DDOS the miners?

[spooderman]

I assume it is well established that this is not possible or a question that would only be asked by someone with little technical understanding.

I'd just like to know why it's presumably not possible, because it would be a pain wouldn't it? Sending lots of useless information to the network? How can we rely on people only sending transactions to the network?

What don't I understand here?

Thanks.

edit: I'm not saying their useless info would end up in the blockchain, I'm just saying the nodes would have to deal with loads of spam all the time.

edit: get technical, I love it

[spin]

There is quite a bit.  A search for DDOS produces the following:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=128548.0

Protections I can think of are:
- tx fee (and the minimum tx fee) https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fee
- tx relay policy (only valid tx with valid fees are relayed)
- only valid blocks are relayed.
- blocks have a maximum size
- a node that continue to receive invalid tx/blocks from another node will disconnect from that node

That's my lay understanding of it.