Dust Attack

[Taras]

This kind of spamming for the sake of advertising is nothing new, this has been happening for years. I remember fondly a time long ago when I received a 1 satoshi dust payment, while I had three outputs each with BTC0.33333333 - i spent those outputs along with the dust satoshi and consolidated them into precisely BTC1. The one time dust was handy.

There was a lot of spam like this because a popular block explorer allowed you to attach easily-readable public messages to bitcoin transactions. Just spam a thousand addresses, and a thousand people will see your spammy message. It was a stupid idea that was since gutted.