I followed the tierion telegram, here is some clarification of what happened.
There was a "lottery" reward system, of 6537 TNT attributed to one random node every 30 minutes.
With a low number of nodes, this was very appealing, having more nodes increases winning stats.
That meant for long term investors, that they could leverage their investment - if you invested 50k$ in tierion, you could spawn 200 nodes, with a VPS at 5$ per month, cost of leveraging investment was only 1%... so why not.
Add to this that it is easy to write a script for the automation of nodes (I shared one at
https://github.com/jupiter126/updatetierionnodes) - and have been reported it was used to spawn at least 500 nodes...
Hence many people started spawing many nodes, the count reaching over 10000 in 2 weeks of mainnet launch.
Now the thing is that tierion did not expect such a rise in the number of nodes. On the one hand, the internal infrastructure of tierion was not ready to handle this kind of volume, while on the other hand so many people competing for rewards and testing the software uncovered a few bugs.
With those bugs being exploited in the wild, many node operators complained - hence tierion asked node operators to temporarily downsize their network to one node, and disabled the rewards for the time being.
My bet is that once Tierion has addressed those infrastructure issues and critical bugs, the network will return to "normal operations", reenabling rewards and telling nodeoperators to run as many nodes as they want.
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Edit: The attack described in a post above goes as following:
chainpoint-cli can be used on any computer
chainpoint-node is the node
To run the node, you some TNT, AND some credits, each time one chainpoint-cli sends a hash requests to a node, the node submits it to core and spends one credit.
With the IP's of nodes available through the API, it was very easy for anybody to write a script, sending hash requests to a node, to deplete it from its credits.
Right now, credits are free, and Tierion tops up all nodes every 24 hours, so this attack became pointless. This is a temporary situation though, as credits sales to node operators seems to be Tierion's main revenue source. This attack would allow to spend a competitors money in the worst case, and in the best case disrupt his node by getting his TNT balance lower than the requirement limit. So yes the attack is DDOSING the network is done at node operators cost, not the attacker.
