Who pulled the plug on Roger Ver's and Jihan Wu's blockchain spambot?

[Wind_FURY]

The mempool is consistently decreasing since December. Is this Segwit coming to effect or did someone unplug Roger Ver's and Jihan Wu's spambot?

https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-count

Some transactions with under $1.00 in fees are also confirming.

https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-state-by-fee-level

Are the big blockers giving up?

[davis196]

Last year i thought that the Segwit developers are spamming the blockchain in order to force the btc users to support Segwit.Maybe i`m wrong.Anyway,the "spambot" stopped for a while,but it will start again,when the bitcoin price starts a bullish trend.The mempool coint decreased because of some other factors.The panic selling during the last 2 weeks decreased and some exchange platfroms had reduced the number of new users creating accounts.

[Herbert2020]

it has not stopped completely as it seems. when you look at the mempool-count it is a bit misleading in cases like this. but when you look at the mempool-size you can see it is still big despite it coming down a lot.
you can also look at the number of transactions in blocks. normally there are ~2000-2500 transactions in a full block. but for the past couple of days there are lots of blocks with 200-500 tx/block!

the spam bot is consolidating the UTXO set to get ready for next time?

[Wind_FURY]

it has not stopped completely as it seems. when you look at the mempool-count it is a bit misleading in cases like this. but when you look at the mempool-size you can see it is still big despite it coming down a lot.

It is still consistently going down though. Give it some more time.

you can also look at the number of transactions in blocks. normally there are ~2000-2500 transactions in a full block. but for the past couple of days there are lots of blocks with 200-500 tx/block!

Right! Does that mean 80% to 90% of the total transactions per block are from spamming?

the spam bot is consolidating the UTXO set to get ready for next time?

I do not know what you mean by consolidating the UTXO set. But yes, Roger Ver will be plugging it back in again.

[Kakmakr]

A lot of the Signature campaigns are now asking people to switch to SegWit addresses, because the transactions are much cheaper on SegWit. The Signature campaigns are one of the feeding sources for Bitcoin  in a much bigger Bitcoin ecosystem.

A increase in SegWit adoption will cause a reduction in Legacy Bitcoin transactions, so these guys have to increase their cost to spam the Legacy MemPool, to have the same affect as before. <It is costing them more money to spam the network now>  

[d5000]

I asked myself the same question ... and had exactly the same suspicion like the OP

Segwit may be part of the explanation, but I think not really: Segwit.party shows that Segwit transactions are growing, but still are making up only around ~15% of total transactions.

Even stranger: BCH is now more profitable than BTC according to fork.lol, so the explanation is not "more miners coming from BCH".

So yes, some spammer seems to have stopped. Is he/she celebrating Chinese New Year?

[Herbert2020]

you can also look at the number of transactions in blocks. normally there are ~2000-2500 transactions in a full block. but for the past couple of days there are lots of blocks with 200-500 tx/block!

Right! Does that mean 80% to 90% of the total transactions per block are from spamming?

since not all of the blocks are like this and there are still blocks with more transactions in them, then it is not 80-90% (even if it were 500 tx compared to 2000 is 75%)

the spam bot is consolidating the UTXO set to get ready for next time?

I do not know what you mean by consolidating the UTXO set. But yes, Roger Ver will be plugging it back in again.

one way to spam is to take a transaction worth for example 50BTC and break it into multiple new transaction outputs (increasing UTXO) this will do 2 things: increase the size of your transaction so you take up a bigger place in a block and also make nodes have a harder time loading the UTXO set. then break them down to more and more and more... the rising part of the chart below. of course part of the rise is genuine more adoption.
then when you are  done spamming, you continue spamming with combining all those outputs and getting a new one so for example 20 UTXO turn into 1 and .... until you get the 50BTC - fees (or 50BTC if you were a miner spamming ) back in one address getting ready for next spam attack.



link: https://blockchain.info/charts/utxo-count?timespan=30days

[OgNasty]

This is another possible reason for the reduction in mempool size.

https://twitter.com/BitGo/status/954998877920247808

[Herbert2020]

This is another possible reason for the reduction in mempool size.

https://twitter.com/BitGo/status/954998877920247808

considering the following in the past month or so i would say it was not the reason:
- mempool size has been ~60-100 MB with ~80k-200k unconfirmed transaction on average.
- the blocks were ~2 MB which is 1 MB bigger than what they are most of the times.
- there has been only 5 of these 2 MB blocks so far. to be exact:
    2x 2.1 MB
    3x 2 MB
    3x 1.9 MB
    3x 1.8 MB
    2x 1.7 MB
    9x 1.6 MB
    10x 1.5 MB
    in the same period which is only an additional of 22.1 MB which is nowhere near capable of making up for 100 MB mempool if it was not a spam attack.

as a side node, have you noticed the number of  empty blocks today? most of which mined by AntPool
https://blockchain.info/blocks

[bug.lady]

The mempool is consistently decreasing since December. Is this Segwit coming to effect or did someone unplug Roger Ver's and Jihan Wu's spambot?

https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-count

Some transactions with under $1.00 in fees are also confirming.

https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-state-by-fee-level

Are the big blockers giving up?

There is a discrepancy betwen the chart you are citing and the real live unconfirmed transaction number from https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions
Each time I am looking the live number is 2-4 times higher than the chart.

It is a bug I think (other source: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/68691/discrepancy-between-blockchain-info-live-unconfirmed-transactions-page-and-chart )

Anyway, it is going down all right (it used to be 200k+ last month) but I think that the main reason behind it is relative tranquility of the market at present. There were one or two spikes in unconfirmed transactions number in November that were not really explicable (BCH related bot?) but the rest of the spikes ideally aligned with massive buys or sells related to extreme bitcoin price moves last month. The bitcoin network was not able to support the demand at those times, it would seem, and later it took considerable time for the network to "unclog".

[Nebell]

The names of these idiots are known?
How has no one killed them yet?

[NeuroticFish]

Are the big blockers giving up?

No, but you have missed the other news which may be related to this:
they are relocating the "cloud mining" servers out of China, having some of their operations halted for now.

But again, the numbers don't add up perfectly, since the halt happened in January 10 and the mempool started decreasing a few days after.
Of course, there may have been a delay between the official stop and the real stop and then it makes sense.

The names of these idiots are known?
How has no one killed them yet?

Au contraire, people are buying their coin and make them rich.

[Wind_FURY]

A lot of the Signature campaigns are now asking people to switch to SegWit addresses, because the transactions are much cheaper on SegWit. The Signature campaigns are one of the feeding sources for Bitcoin  in a much bigger Bitcoin ecosystem.

A increase in SegWit adoption will cause a reduction in Legacy Bitcoin transactions, so these guys have to increase their cost to spam the Legacy MemPool, to have the same affect as before. <It is costing them more money to spam the network now>  

This is self promotion, but I believe I have some credit for that. Haha.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2666388.0

This is another possible reason for the reduction in mempool size.

https://twitter.com/BitGo/status/954998877920247808

considering the following in the past month or so i would say it was not the reason:
- mempool size has been ~60-100 MB with ~80k-200k unconfirmed transaction on average.
- the blocks were ~2 MB which is 1 MB bigger than what they are most of the times.
- there has been only 5 of these 2 MB blocks so far. to be exact:
    2x 2.1 MB
    3x 2 MB
    3x 1.9 MB
    3x 1.8 MB
    2x 1.7 MB
    9x 1.6 MB
    10x 1.5 MB
    in the same period which is only an additional of 22.1 MB which is nowhere near capable of making up for 100 MB mempool if it was not a spam attack.

as a side node, have you noticed the number of  empty blocks today? most of which mined by AntPool
https://blockchain.info/blocks

I am impressed with your blockchain searching skills. What site do you use and how, or do you do all that manually?  

Are the big blockers giving up?

No, but you have missed the other news which may be related to this:
they are relocating the "cloud mining" servers out of China, having some of their operations halted for now.

But again, the numbers don't add up perfectly, since the halt happened in January 10 and the mempool started decreasing a few days after.
Of course, there may have been a delay between the official stop and the real stop and then it makes sense.

They plugged the spambot back in again.

[Herbert2020]

{snip}
I am impressed with your blockchain searching skills. What site do you use and how, or do you do all that manually? 

nah, it wasn't manual i used this https://www.smartbit.com.au/blocks?sort=size&limit=20
i may do some analysis manually if the UTXO count continued going down like this picture above, i am very interested in blockchain analysis in general.

[NeuroticFish]

They plugged the spambot back in again.

I think that they didn't. Or at least not at full power.
Or maybe they're not the only big spammers... 

[Pursuer]

They plugged the spambot back in again.

I think that they didn't. Or at least not at full power.
Or maybe they're not the only big spammers... 

nah, it certainly doesn't look like a restart of the spam attack to me.
the increase in the mempool count (which didn't last that long and wasn't that big either) happened right as the price started dropping and then recovering back up again. and whenever a big movement like this happens (specially at big supports/resistances) there is a lot of transactions on chain because of it.

whether price has gone up or down some people move their coins to exchanges to dump and some others buy the coins and withdraw them to their wallets to store. and that increases it.