Noob question on transaction time manipulation

[trhthtrhtrhtrh]

hi, apologies is this has already been answered. My understanding is that a finite number of transactions on bitcoin can be processed at a time, and transactions not done in that time sit in the 'mempool' where they presumably are queued. my question is, could a hostile  party (such as a bank or competing ICO) simply grind bitcoin to a halt by permanently flooding the exchanges with tiny transactions between addresses they own, or is there something in place to prevent this? Is this what happened when the exchanges went down yesterday? also, is this risk inherent of all cryptocurrencies or only some of them?

[Yakamoto]

hi, apologies is this has already been answered. My understanding is that a finite number of transactions on bitcoin can be processed at a time, and transactions not done in that time sit in the 'mempool' where they presumably are queued. my question is, could a hostile  party (such as a bank or competing ICO) simply grind bitcoin to a halt by permanently flooding the exchanges with tiny transactions between addresses they own, or is there something in place to prevent this? Is this what happened when the exchanges went down yesterday? also, is this risk inherent of all cryptocurrencies or only some of them?

That has happened a few times, where there has been a spam attack which slowed the network and drove up fees for users, all because someone somewhere began to push an agenda that realistically didn't ever come to fruition since the network always bounced back after the miners ground through the blocks and started to rid the network of the spammed transactions. I do not believe that is why exchanges had crashed yesterday, that was likely a ton of people logging on trying to get more money into the system and buy more, resulting in exchanges having crashing websites and, in turn, crashing the market.

[mk4]

could a hostile  party (such as a bank or competing ICO) simply grind bitcoin to a halt by permanently flooding the exchanges with tiny transactions between addresses they own, or is there something in place to prevent this?

To answer your question, yes. The blockchain has been flooded multiple times already. By whom? I don't think we know for sure. It has been rumored that the BitcoinCash(BCH) supporters are attacking the bitcoin blockchain by flooding it with transactions. Hence drastically slowing down transaction times. But then again, these are just rumors.

Do we have something to prevent this? I don't think so. At least not currently; hopefully as soon as possible. I don't think we can really achieve mass adoption with these transaction speeds and transaction fees.

[stompix]

hi, apologies is this has already been answered. My understanding is that a finite number of transactions on bitcoin can be processed at a time, and transactions not done in that time sit in the 'mempool' where they presumably are queued.

Correct.

my question is, could a hostile  party (such as a bank or competing ICO) simply grind bitcoin to a halt by permanently flooding the exchanges with tiny transactions between addresses they own, or is there something in place to prevent this?

Again you're right, they can try and to this.
Although technically is that they can't stop bitcoin, they will just end up with only their transactions getting processed, the block chain will go on.

And the mechanism in place is called fee.
You can try and do this, but you must compete with all the users and outbid them.
And at current price it's going to cost you around 15k per block. But when the bid wars starts be ready to spend triple the amount.

Is this what happened when the exchanges went down yesterday? also, is this risk inherent of all cryptocurrencies or only some of them?

Exchanges are not running on the chain. Nothing to do with transactions.

also, is this risk inherent of all cryptocurrencies or only some of them?

All can fall victim to such attack. The other cryptos have more space available but also are not used as heavenly.(bcash has 1/10 of the btc network tx)
If you have enough money you can spam even coins with 10Gb blocks.