Potentially miners attack?

[y.baidiuk]

Since February 2023 mempool almost not empty and i thought that 2-3 biggest pool can spam mempool with low-fee transactions just to get more fee.
Just check out this block: https://mempool.space/block/0000000000000000000421dea73b197dec0c1c57a4620c274b7b048c1786c35b
all block is full of $0.08 cent transactions with $0.24 cents fee.
Probably we need additional compression for transactions like this because that all have same amount, fee and OUTPUT address, or some other solution.
I heard that Stratum V2 firmware can potentialy solve some problems by giving more freedom to individual miner, which can avoid this transactions.
What are you thinking about it ?

[1714285369]

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[1714285369]

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[hosseinimr93]

Such transactions are spamming the network and have caused transaction fees to be higher, but it's not true that they are created by miners.
There are many other transactions similar to those you are talking about in other blocks and in the mempool and they are all related to ordinal scams.

[dansus021]

I think this is somewhat similar with dust attack tho I just know it today, But if this spamming Bitcoin work we should see the spike in Bitcoin fee in the next block but after watching your Block transaction the next block and other blocks are still at the 6 sat/vb.

[ImThour]

Maybe your theory is correct, just like how Antivirus companies spread virus over Internet, miners (not all of them) might be adding these transactions to the the network just to get more fee.
It's a possibility to be very honest. How about you do some research and try to gather intel if these are actually miners who are doing it or it's due to the BTC Ordinal stuff? That's what I guess it is.

[stompix]

Just check out this block: https://mempool.space/block/0000000000000000000421dea73b197dec0c1c57a4620c274b7b048c1786c35b
all block is full of $0.08 cent transactions with $0.24 cents fee.

So are all other blocks at that time, what's so special about it?
Besides, it's not full of 8 cents fees, it also has stuff like this in it:
https://mempool.space/tx/34c4240978cc8497a82f3770e6e68ba43cd1e040b1135be91caf4cd3971665e5
Fee   3,832,070 sat $1,107

I heard that Stratum V2 firmware can potentialy solve some problems by giving more freedom to individual miner, which can avoid this transactions.

What is wrong with those transactions?
They are valid transactions, getting accepted by nodes, and they pay the fee just like others, who are you or anyone else to decide what should be allowed and what not? Besides, the individual miner, unless he somehow manages to get 2-3 Exahash of hashing power so, about 10-20 thousand miners at least can't and won't be able to do a thing.

Yeah, let's start censoring stuff we don't like because obviously, that's what Bitcoin was designed for!
Next will be thumblers and mixers because they make hundreds of tx, then there will be consolidations cause they also take too much space, then transactions under 10$ cause they present no interest then banning transactions between same wallets as they also clog the mempool, then miners won't accept transactions unless the owner of the originating address hasn't already submitted a sperm sample along his KYC data.

[Jason Brendon]

Guys, we must stop our mempool from being spammed.

[seoincorporation]

There is a problem with the transactions spam attack, and the problem is that you have to pay for each transaction. So, for an attack like this you need to spend a big amount.

Is the same as a business paying for marketing campaigns to get more sales, miners pay fees to increase the fees by priority. But is not the best strategy because your competitors (the other miners) get the same high fees benefit on each mined block when the mempool is full.

[Jawhead999]

Stratum V2 will make people who don't have a lot money can't start to mine, so we can expect Bitcoin miners are probably like top 5-10 big companies. It will make them easier to reject some transactions since there are only few miners.

But I doubt it because miners are profit oriented, so they high likely will accept any transactions regardless it's Bitcoin or shitcoins that run in Bitcoin network.

Guys, we must stop our mempool from being spammed.

How? however currently the mempool is already normal.

[Husires]

What are you thinking about it ?

Miners are not the only ones benefiting from higher transaction fees but some altcoins and exchanges, in 2017 there was a high volume of hashtags to support the BCH hypothesis and prove that Bitcoin is not suitable for everyday transactions.
Miners are the weaker party in the spam attack, as they do not make a profit from it, but on the contrary, the spam transactions that they make make the block full, while it could have been to include more transactions in that block and earn more fees.

If you think the fees are high, stop sending transactions.

[ranochigo]

The opportunity cost of including these transactions would be those that could have been included to give the miners a higher profit. That would make sense if there is a collusion among the miners to artificially inflate the fees but generally game theory negates all of these collusion and would result in a far lower profit than expected.

Besides, the fact that most wallets are biased towards mempool size rather than historical block data as a fee estimation makes this less likely to influence the fees to a large extent.

[logfiles]

The problem started since the inception of the scam Bitcoin ordinals, and everyone who loves Bitcoin hates them. Very many times the discussion to block such a thing has gone up to the level of Bitcoin developers, but they just decided to let it be.
Obviously we know the ordinals hype will fade up with time but until then we just have to hang in there

[odolvlobo]

Since February 2023 mempool almost not empty and i thought that 2-3 biggest pool can spam mempool with low-fee transactions just to get more fee.

That doesn't make sense because the miner would be paying the fees that they earn. Why would a miner to fill a block with their own transactions that effectively earn them nothing when they can include transactions that earn something?

If a miner doesn't want to include transactions with low fees, then they just don't include them. Its not clear why a miner would do that because the miner would be giving up money for no benefit.

[hosseinimr93]

That doesn't make sense because the miner would be paying the fees that they earn. Why would a miner to fill a block with their own transactions that effectively earn them nothing when they can include transactions that earn something?

Exactly. As I said in the first reply, those transactions are related to ordinal scams and are not made by miners.
If such transactions are made by miners, not only they don't earn any money from them, but they also waste some money. All those transactions are creating dusts and it would be very expensive to spend them.

[pooya87]

Although the possibility of mining pools spamming the network is not zero but it is not that common because the mining pool doesn't receive the fees even if they don't let the rest of the network see the spam transactions and mine them all themselves. The fee is paid to the miners based on their share of the hashrate. In other words this is a very costly attack for the pool.

BTW you can't just find spam by looking at the raw fee in dollar paid by transactions. Actual blockchain analysis is needed.

[BlackHatCoiner]

I've had began a similar thread a little while ago, check it out: What happens if pools try to maximize fees by congesting the network?. My conclusion is that it requires coordination between miners, which can go against game theory.

That doesn't make sense because the miner would be paying the fees that they earn.

It'd be the same as mining an empty block, with the exception that if another miner mined that block, they'd take those miners' transaction fees.

Why would a miner to fill a block with their own transactions that effectively earn them nothing when they can include transactions that earn something?

To trick those others into paying more with replace-by-fee, to get better priority.

[hosseinimr93]

It'd be the same as mining an empty block, with the exception that if another miner mined that block, they'd take those miners' transaction fees.

That's worse than mining an empty block.
The transactions OP is referring to have created outputs worth 294 satoshi which is equal to the dust limit. Assuming those transactions have been made by a mining pool, the mining pool have lost money even if the transactions have been mined by themselves and we neglect the computing expenses.

[BlackHatCoiner]

The transactions OP is referring to have created outputs worth 294 satoshi which is equal to the dust limit.

Sure, these particular transactions they describe make the entire process more expensive, because when the time comes they spend these, they'll have large sized transactions. But, the same attack can be executed without adding anything to the UTXO set, say sending 0 sat to OP_RETURN.

[franky1]

The transactions OP is referring to have created outputs worth 294 satoshi which is equal to the dust limit. Assuming those transactions have been made by a mining pool, the mining pool have lost money even if the transactions have been mined by themselves and we neglect the computing expenses.

block has over 5k tx
imagining it made 5000 tx of 294sat is less than $400
block reward of 6.25= $163,000
seems the pool still made money

[pooya87]

block has over 5k tx
imagining it made 5000 tx of 294sat is less than $400
block reward of 6.25= $163,000
seems the pool still made money

As I pointed out above the pool doesn't receive the block reward+fee, the miners do. The pool itself only take a percentage for the service they provide. That means if the pool had indeed paid $400 in spam fees, they have indeed lost money.

[Blitzboy]

These redundant low-fee transactions clogging the mempool, though? It's an attack on decentralization itself

This block shows what humans will do when they can utilize an opportunity. None of this surprises me. Greed is human nature. Large pools spamming the mempool is a nasty act of centralized authority gaining control.

V2 stratum? While it promises to allow miners to level the scales, no single solution is a panacea. Strategies to exploit systems will always exist. A cat-and-mouse game.

We need a community-wide ideological transformation, not just another answer. Time for communal self-reflection and action. It's not what I think, but how ready are you to fight these exploitative strategies?