mystery deposits of 1 satoshi appearing in my wallet

[vints998]

This evening I have had two deposits of 1 satoshi each appear. So far unconfirmed, seen by 1 peer.
I have put the transaction hash into blockchain.info, and they appear to be part of blocks containing hundreds of single satoshi transactions.
Is this some kind of attack on the blockchain?
I noticed that one of the addresses in one transaction contains the characters "enjoy", and in the other on "sochi".
What are the chances of real words occuring in a bitcoin address?
I could post the transaction hashes here if it is safe to do so.

Vince.

[goosoodude]

Happening to everyone. It's bitwars.org... I'm getting tired of it too.

[vints998]

Just had a look to see what "bitwars" is, am none the wiser.
Still don't understand how it can be affecting me if I have never had any contact with them.
Did they harvest my address from somebody else that I had contact with? Like some kind of infectious bit-disease!

[goosoodude]

They find addresses from blockchain.info. Most likely they look for the newest TX's and scrape addresses. Then, they spam them. It's advertising to millions of people. Think of it as viral marketing on YouTube, just this time, it's forced onto people. When you do that, people start to HATE the service.

[Localbtcbuyer]

A problem will occur if you need to spend your entire buitcoin balance, but they sent you this 1 satoshi.  Since it wont confirm, your new transaction will not confirm either, until it is dropped from the nodes.  I almost transferred my balance elsewhere, but then I saw that I had 2 of those satoshi transactions, so i didnt send full balance. 

[vints998]

Sounds like there is a good opportunity here for somebody to develop a "spam filter" to put a stop to this. A wallet that did that would be worth having.

[tacotime]

Edit: Mea culpa. This attack described by Localbtcbuyer shouldn't work because most wallets will never allow you to incorporate an unconfirmed tx originating from an address you don't own, so spending is safe unless I'm missing something.

So, I'm not totally sure where these are coming from or why, aside from simply being advertisements or spam containing messages to end users of clients.

The malleability issue is described further here: https://blog.conformal.com/transaction-malleability-no-shortcuts-allowed/

Remind me to sleep tonight because I'm clearly verging on incoherence X)

[vints998]

Wish I understood that tacotime.
So, should I avoid using the address thats been spammed?
I have read that deleting addresses from your wallet can cause problems- is that true...

[tacotime]

Wish I understood that tacotime.
So, should I avoid using the address thats been spammed?
I have read that deleting addresses from your wallet can cause problems- is that true...

edit: My mistake, see above.  You shouldn't ever be allowed to spend these unless your client is really broken, and the 1 satoshi tx should never enter a block.

[Localbtcbuyer]

Wish I understood that tacotime.
So, should I avoid using the address thats been spammed?
I have read that deleting addresses from your wallet can cause problems- is that true...

Avoid using it until the spam has one confirmation, unless you get new spam.

If the address is otherwise unused, remove the keypair from your wallet, as it costs more to spend than it's worth anyway.  Deleting keypairs (addresses) is not consequential for well implemented software, but might be bad for poorly implemented software.

It seems once they send one spam to you, they monitor the address, and send a spam everytime.  I now have 3.

[tacotime]

You should be able to get away with spending quantities that don't include these satoshis, it depends on how your client builds the tx script.  You can only spend it if you generate a tx script that doesn't spend the spam outputs.

[medUSA]

I have 4 of them now, from 2 different spammers.
I have a feeling that this kind of satoshi spam advertising is going to be here for a while.
So, get used to them. They should disappear from wallet in a week (only my guess).

[goosoodude]

Ok, here's my advice. Keep record on your "Satoshi Spam." DO NOT SPEND THAT!!! It's fine if you don't use the spam, but if you do, it remains unconfirmed. Right now I have 8 Satoshis that I'm not going to spend. I have over 0.4 BTC in my wallet. This means I can use all of them, OTHER THAN THE LAST 8 SATOSHIS in my wallet.

[vints998]

When you say don't spend from that address, do you mean that "wallet"?
When I used the term "address", I meant receiving address.
If you can't spend from the wallet, then thats a pain if you have all your coins in one wallet.

Vince.

[vints998]

aah, thats ok then if you can spend any but the spam that remains.

Thanks.

[tacotime]

If these are 1 satoshi (0.00000001 BTC), then they will never actually enter a block on the network because they're below the spam threshold (54.3 uBTC) for pretty much every miner out there.  In this case, the txid will never make it into a block, so trying to spend it will result in your tx having a non-existing input and being invalidated.  This costs the sender nothing as an attack, but this should never happen as clients do not allow you to spend unconfirmed outputs from addresses you don't own.

So, probably these are just ads.

[vints998]

Thanks for your answers, I still don't really understand, but I guess you are saying that it's not really a problem and the transactions will get cancelled on their own in a few days any way.
This could be a real nuisance though if it gets worse and everybody starts getting dozens or even thousands of these things.
That is exactly the kind of thing which would put people off using BTC and probably kill it off.

[Webnet]

Cant be spent either. Someone should let them know their blowing up the blockchain

[medUSA]

Cant be spent either. Someone should let them know their blowing up the blockchain

The transactions don't actually get into the blockchain, they are rarely (close to never) get accepted.
They just cause lots of trouble for the novice users, who included the satoshis into subsequent transactions.

[vints998]

Today I noticed that these transactions are not found any more using blockchain.info.
I did a "reset blockchain and transactions" operation and they have now disappeared from the wallet.
I am using Multibit.

Thanks for all the responses, and apologies that I had not noticed that this issue had already been raised several times before.