How many people have received random .00000001 transactions to their wallets?

[vga]

Ok. Now I'm getting way too many of these things. What can be done?

[FoBoT]

yes. then blockchain got rid of them and then i got two more

[Adrian-x]

I have some reading to do,

I noticed 50% of my Casascius Bitcoins I bought in November of 2011 have been given Bitcoin dust.

edit*  
just checked and what do you know they have vanished.

edit2*
everyone who had a transaction show up and posted here can not be tagged .

They only vanished because of a piece of code in whatever client you are looking at which forgets about unconfirmed transactions after a certain amount of time.

It would be kind of a an elegant solution to be able to analyze the block chain for taint using an HPC cluster, and tag targeted addresses using a mechanism like this.  And it would not be terribly onerous to force people to look for the tagging and make a ping back to mothership when they see one.  If the operator wish to or are forced to honor a taint authority that is.

As I've said before, I'll certainly be checking for taint and rejecting tainted bitcoins even though I personally am extremely negative about tainting for a variety of reasons.  I'll even patch my systematized to do this if need be.  I'm not going to eat a bullet for others and accept devalued bitcoins just out of some noble principle, and I suspect that 99% of those who think they will will change their minds when the chips are down.  This is why I believe that tainting will work extremely well if it gets worms it's way in.

So Mike Caldwell, could have been laundering dirty Bitcoin onto Casascius coins?

[tvbcof]

So Mike Caldwell, could have been laundering dirty Bitcoin onto Casascius coins?

Sure he could have, either knowingly or unknowingly, but that's tangential.  Anyone who has any BTC which they did not personally mine or track back to the original miner could have tainted coins (depending on who's deciding what taints what) and thus could be playing a part in 'laundering dirty bitcoins.'

In the above threads I was only musing on how blacklisting/tainting might be implemented in a workable manner.  My musings on private_key<->individual_identity mappings which relates to Casascius is contained elsewhere.

Telling everyone to check with a tainting authority for every transaction has operational difficulties.  Telling everyone to look for a tag and require that they check with an authority (if they wish to understand the magnitude of the devaluation) only if they spot a tag which the system carries along is much more tenable.

Of course it would be impossible to tell me as an individual how I must value the coins I hold, but it would be rather easy for the government to tell TigerDirect that they must consult whatever taint authority gains a government charter.  That would be part of have a 'Bitcoin License.'  And again, I personally will value BTC which cannot be spent at TigerDirect less than BTC which can.  And will avoid them.

Whatever outfit gains a government charter to taint Bitcoins will have amazing power over the Bitcoin economy.  Much more so than the feeble powers of the treasury and federal reserve in USD-land.

[troy112]

Now the question is has any of these transactions been confirmed?? If yes then how will it affect the existing balance in the wallet??

[roslinpl]

yes. then blockchain got rid of them and then i got two more

when does it happen?

are they still spamming BTC network?

[Raize]

IOW, it would be a light-weight marker which could be used to allow people to run stand-alone, but serve as a trigger telling users that they need to check with a taint authority for particular transactions.  The taint authority could insert these markers and communicate directives to retain them.  If non-authorities tried the same trick it would not matter since force of law would not require honoring them and thus they could not be used for DOS purposes (via creating excessive load.)

Well, it could be a trial for such a system, but if so they are implementing/testing it oddly.

I have a few old cold storage wallets with a semi-notable amount of coin each from 2011. Nothing has changed on them for about two and a half years now. All public keys for them were funded directly from a single purchase on Gox, but only 1 of which received a dust transaction. So either I've got some stacks of coin that should have been tainted but weren't, or one of those stacks was falsely marked via this system as tainted.

If it is a taint system, I'd be pretty surprised at what their possible explanation could be for the justification of marking a stack of coin from 2011 as tainted.

I can also confirm I've had at least two Casascius coins tained of varying face values, both from November 2011.

[sawani]

That seems possible ... in any case I transferred out of the wallet and am now using a new wallet.   Frankly I'm amazed that people so freely post public addresses.   I for one don't want people to know which wallet belongs to me.

[tvbcof]

IOW, it would be a light-weight marker which could be used to allow people to run stand-alone, but serve as a trigger telling users that they need to check with a taint authority for particular transactions.  The taint authority could insert these markers and communicate directives to retain them.  If non-authorities tried the same trick it would not matter since force of law would not require honoring them and thus they could not be used for DOS purposes (via creating excessive load.)

Well, it could be a trial for such a system, but if so they are implementing/testing it oddly.

I have a few old cold storage wallets with a semi-notable amount of coin each from 2011. Nothing has changed on them for about two and a half years now. All public keys for them were funded directly from a single purchase on Gox, but only 1 of which received a dust transaction. So either I've got some stacks of coin that should have been tainted but weren't, or one of those stacks was falsely marked via this system as tainted.

If it is a taint system, I'd be pretty surprised at what their possible explanation could be for the justification of marking a stack of coin from 2011 as tainted.

I can also confirm I've had at least two Casascius coins tained of varying face values, both from November 2011.

Back when I was a buyer in Q3/Q4 2011 I was using Tradehill exclusively.  Mt. Gox tried their hand at taint analysis and locked up the accounts of a few people.  Within a few days it became clear that the BTC had come through Tradehill and the users impacted were simply doing arbitrage.  Supposedly the value in question originated with the ~allinvain theft (or purported theft.)

I mention this because it is certainly the case that old BTC from 'our time' are definitely prone to being tracked.  Probably even more so as the history was less complex back then.

I'll also note that at the 2013 SJ conference Vessenes (then and now the chairman of the board of the Bitcoin Foundation) said in no uncertain terms that people should not use mixing services because their coins could end up tainted.  The implication I took from this was that taint would be, or could be, applied retroactively.

It might be noted that if taint is imposed as a condition of obtaining a 'Bitcoin License' as is in the works in New York apparently, and it causes unfairness and thus loss of confidence in the Bitcoin system, this probably won't exactly break the hearts of the regulatory and law enforcement agencies who are charged with 'dealing with it.'

[iluvpie60]

There is a thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=458934 started by people receiving 1 satoshi from addresses beginning with "1Enjoy" and "1Sochi", but I just saw two transactions for .00000001 to my wallet from this address: 1Bhv6XjXBvraivcATHwwLMscZ5xJm9FsPn

there is a link to https://bitwars.org/ next to the address, so maybe just spam from a gambling site, but it seems fishy that all these small transactions are happening around the same time. Attack on the blockchain? dusting?

Check you wallet(s), how many people have received random deposits for .00000001?

I actually got 2 transactions for .00000000 somehow... and when I went to look at it again today both of the transactions are gone! WTF? They were there like all day yesterday, now it only says I have one transaction, but at one point it did tell me I had 3... How weird... Is this being used to keep track of us? Someone sending out .00000000 transactions so they can eventually track all of our BTC addresses???

[tvbcof]

I actually got 2 transactions for .00000000 somehow... and when I went to look at it again today both of the transactions are gone! WTF? They were there like all day yesterday, now it only says I have one transaction, but at one point it did tell me I had 3... How weird... Is this being used to keep track of us? Someone sending out .00000000 transactions so they can eventually track all of our BTC addresses???

There is really no mystery here.  Someone sent you some perfectly valid (and tiny) transactions.  They were signed appropriately and went out on the network.  Whatever client you are looking at saw these transactions and added them to your balance.

Eventually these transactions go long enough without being mined (and thus made part of the blockchain) that whatever client you are looking at gave up and decided they would never be 'confirmed'.  Thus, they appear to you to have 'disappeared'.

It is increasingly less likely that transactions which don't include a transaction fee will ever be mined.  Thankfully!  Thus, these spams (or tags or whatever) are generally not going to appear persistent to most people's clients.  Without including a transaction fee, a guy with 1 BTC can send out millions of these on the network.  (They would not be using the reference software to implement the protocol of course.)

An interesting thing here is that just because one client eventually shit-cans transactions which are not confirmed doesn't mean that every client does.  It's a setting.  And I could imagine it being quite trivial to code things such that '1enjoy' and '1sochi' associated non-confirmed transactions are never discarded.  Thus, they just hang around as a tag on a particular address for anyone running the modified software to use.  That is why it strikes me as a light-weight and unobtrusive tagging system which leverages the Bitcoin network itself as a propagation mechanism.

I'm not 100% sure of my assertions here so I would welcome a second opinion on how some of this stuff works.

[iluvpie60]

I actually got 2 transactions for .00000000 somehow... and when I went to look at it again today both of the transactions are gone! WTF? They were there like all day yesterday, now it only says I have one transaction, but at one point it did tell me I had 3... How weird... Is this being used to keep track of us? Someone sending out .00000000 transactions so they can eventually track all of our BTC addresses???

There is really no mystery here.  Someone sent you some perfectly valid (and tiny) transactions.  They were signed appropriately and went out on the network.  Whatever client you are looking at saw these transactions and added them to your balance.

Eventually these transactions go long enough without being mined (and thus made part of the blockchain) that whatever client you are looking at gave up and decided they would never be 'confirmed'.  Thus, they appear to you to have 'disappeared'.

It is increasingly less likely that transactions which don't include a transaction fee will ever be mined.  Thankfully!  Thus, these spams (or tags or whatever) are generally not going to appear persistent to most people's clients.  Without including a transaction fee, a guy with 1 BTC can send out millions of these on the network.  (They would not be using the reference software to implement the protocol of course.)

An interesting thing here is that just because one client eventually shit-cans transactions which are not confirmed doesn't mean that every client does.  It's a setting.  And I could imagine it being quite trivial to code things such that '1enjoy' and '1sochi' associated non-confirmed transactions are never discarded.  Thus, they just hang around as a tag on a particular address for anyone running the modified software to use.  That is why it strikes me as a light-weight and unobtrusive tagging system which leverages the Bitcoin network itself as a propagation mechanism.

I'm not 100% sure of my assertions here so I would welcome a second opinion on how some of this stuff works.

Mine was a local wallet on my computer, and it didn't show up on there. It showed up on my BTC address when I searched it up on blockchain.info. It could be used to run a program, see what all the BTC addresses are, and someone could easily be using a program to check if the address is real or not and keep a record of them all. It's the only thing that makes the most sense(other than spam). Who would do this you ask? We don't know, we can guess, government(they want to tax and regulate good chance).

[tvbcof]

I actually got 2 transactions for .00000000 somehow... and when I went to look at it again today both of the transactions are gone! WTF? They were there like all day yesterday, now it only says I have one transaction, but at one point it did tell me I had 3... How weird... Is this being used to keep track of us? Someone sending out .00000000 transactions so they can eventually track all of our BTC addresses???

There is really no mystery here.  Someone sent you some perfectly valid (and tiny) transactions.  They were signed appropriately and went out on the network.  Whatever client you are looking at saw these transactions and added them to your balance.

Eventually these transactions go long enough without being mined (and thus made part of the blockchain) that whatever client you are looking at gave up and decided they would never be 'confirmed'.  Thus, they appear to you to have 'disappeared'.
...

Mine was a local wallet on my computer, and it didn't show up on there. It showed up on my BTC address when I searched it up on blockchain.info. It could be used to run a program, see what all the BTC addresses are, and someone could easily be using a program to check if the address is real or not and keep a record of them all. It's the only thing that makes the most sense(other than spam). Who would do this you ask? We don't know, we can guess, government(they want to tax and regulate good chance).

There is really no such thing as a 'real address'.  Any address which has funding has representation in the block chain (else, how did it get funded?), and thus the public address is available to anyone.  An address which has never been sent any bitcoin might be considered 'not real', but it's also fairly un-interesting.

In other words, there is no need to spam a wallet to find out if an address is 'real'.  The info can be obtained quickly, easily, and cheaply by just parsing the blockchain.

One method of tracking would be to send tiny transactions which are eventually confirmed then hope that when the user tries to make a spend, this dust is swept up and made part of the spend.  This is now expensive because it is not reliable unless the spammer includes a transaction fee (around 5000x the dust value currently) in order to ensure that the dust is confirmed and made permanent.

Client software may try to spend the unconfirmed transactions (like the ones we are talking about here) and it would more-or-less cause the entire wallet to become unusable until the dust transaction eventually fails to confirm.  This because a spend often spends all your money and returns the balance back to your wallet.  This issue of is being worked on.

If your local machine is running a 'full client' then it may be listening for unconfirmed transactions on the network and may pick up this spam.  Very recent developments involve changes to a local client which treats unconfirmed transactions differently in terms of computing balances, deciding how to construct 'spends', etc.  No matter what, software is being used to compute balances, this explains why you see the dust transaction in some places (like blockchain.info which is well connected) and not in others.

Again, these are my own understandings and I am not 100% sure of the exact details so if anyone wants to propose corrections, please do.

[jcoin200]

So is there a chance of having my coinbase account hacked after getting these?  I have 2 from today currently "pending" on my account

[Cryddit]

Offhand I'd say no, not a problem.  Ignore them and they'll eventually go away.

[Adrian-x]

So is there a chance of having my coinbase account hacked after getting these?  I have 2 from today currently "pending" on my account

I believe the transactions will never be confirmed, however it can be considered a form of tagging, if you are a coinbase customer you probably have nothing to worry about. The transaction represents knowledge of your public key so no valid hack vector other than from a law enforcement agency, but it could be some research project tracking coins used or not used in illegal activities, and if "Green listing" is ever enacted, those coins may have a greater or lessor value.

Still consider educating your self on how to create and secure a private key and consider managing your own coins, and not leaving them in the control of a trusted 3rd party.

[Velkro]

I received two today, strange. how do they know my addresses? I kept them on Blockchain wallet, is blockchain hacked?

there is only around 200 000 actively used bitcoin addresses, sending 1 satoshi to each and everyone of them is not that hard or expensive

[grifferz]

How is it a form of tagging when these transactions will never confirm thus will never be permanently recorded in the blockchain?

[MyPotPlantDied]

I received one of those before, but only to an address that I reused numerous times. Since then I make an effort to create a fresh address for every transaction.

[grifferz]

Won't any address used even once still be visible in the public blockchain and thus be a potential target for these spam transactions that never confirm?

I don't see how it is an issue.