Topic: Are we stress testing again? - page 17. (Read 33190 times)

not crash ... but you must have an high bandwidth capacity to stop ... spamming "imputs already spends".

It will take people time to update, but it will interesting to see if we will see gradual improvements quite early. Also comfortable that they are working on a more robust solution.

These are actually very good points you've made, though they have been discussed before; still, it's a good summary.

I think these issues are more pressing, and the community must be aware of them. The developing effort must be directed towards these.

You would obviously need to split the transaction up into a number of other transactions. Right now there is roughly 1.41 BTC unspent in the addresses whose private keys have been disclosed, you would want to have 200 or so inputs per transaction making a roughly 30kb transaction and paying below market fees. The fact that there is such a large backlog in the mempool means that it would be unlikely that these kinds of transactions will get confirmed anytime soon. It also means that it will probably be more profitable for the miners to confirm other transactions (with higher tx fees) then to mop up the unspent outputs from the spam

I tried that already with 2 of the addresses that have been spamming. It would cost 2.4 BTC fee and the transaction would be so large it wouldn't even fit in a block.

By pools/miners or regular users?

I read that those are being swept away as fast as the backlog will allow.

I don't know if this has been discussed, but here it goes: what is the best way to spend the outputs that spammers are leaving on well known private keys? We could try and drain their funds, a bit like f2pool did.

A lot of good points and pretty long debate of what can transform from this type of stress testing i do find that the network transactions are sticking around 170k to 200k in the last week is that about a 30 to 70% increase with the stress testing or spamming transactions going on, i have noticed the panic in people and some regular users being stress about the confirmation time period but we are in a good path to evolution.

Those who dismiss the risk of a 51% attack by that argument usually assume that (a) the attack will be a double-spend or some other banal fraud, and (b) most bitcoiners will scream 'bitcoin is dead" and dump all their holdings when that happens.

As for (a): A cartel or monopoly is usually formed with the goal of increasing the members' revenue over the long term.  In a free market (which is not "a market without government regulation"), the price of the product or service ends up being  a "fair" price, that makes its suppliers roughly as profitable as any other business. In a monopoly or oligopoly market, where new suppliers are excluded by non-market means, the price is such that maximizes the total net revenue of the suppliers.   The banks use their cartel power by charging high fees, not by stealing money from client accounts.

It should be easy to see how a mining cartel with (say) 67% of the hashpower could make smaller miners or pools unprofitable, by selectively orphaning some of their blocks.  If the cartel wished, they could starve all other miners that way, and earn 100% of the block reward instead of only 67%.  That would be a 50% increase in their total revenue, probably a 100% increase in their profits.  With current prices, that extra revenue would be almost 360'000 USD/day, or 130 million USD/year.  The temptation is clearly there -- especially if a price drop to, say 200 USD/BTC, or the next halving of the reward, would make them unprofitable.

A large miner or mining cartel, even with less than 50%, could force an increase in the transaction fees, if there are enough clients who would pay a higher fee for a faster service.  At present, that is not worthwhile, since even if they were 5 or 10 times higher, the transaction fees would still be peanuts compared to the block reward.  However, a majority cartel could force arbitrarily high fees, by orphaning any block that contains transactions with lower fees.  

In fact, I have described in detail, several times, how a majority cartel could impose a change in the protocol --such as a postponment of the next halving -- to all the other players.  Most bitcoiners simply refuse to understand, and claim that the "economic majority" has the power, not the miners.  The few who do understand have ready a "defense" against that: all faithful bitcoiners would abandon bitcoin, and create an altcoin that can be mined only with CPUs -- and declare it as being "the" true bitcoin.

As for (b), that is not the normal reaction of people in such cases.  Americans did not burn their dollar bills when the US government removed their gold/silver backing.  People do not stop using banks or credit cards in protest when these use their cartel power to raise fees or cut services.  People do not stop buying medicines when the pharma industry uss patent laws to charge exorbitant prices.  In general, a cartel or monopoly can force its users to accept any change (such as higher prices) that would be less harmful to them than doing without the service.

For example, suppose that a small miner complained of having a higher orphan rate than the rest, even when he won the block race by tens of seconds.  I bet that 99% of the bitcoin users and holders would not even get to know about his complaint; and the other 1% would blame it on network delays, or some fault of the miner himself.  

Even if it became obvious that a cartel of miners was targeting him, the few bitcoiners who cared would rationalize that "it is the free market at work" (obviously not!), "it has little effect on the hashrate", or "it is good for bitcoin". (Like: "Remember the 6-block reorg after the BIP66 fork? It was started by BTCNuggets, a small miner that had not yet upgraded to v3 when 95% of them already had.  If there were no small miners, the reorg would not have happened.  Small miners increase the risk of a persistent coin split at a fork.")

As for the miners in the cartel pools, why would they switch to a non-cartel pool?  By staying with the cartel, they would increase their revenue as the small competitors are driven out of the field.  By switching, they would risk becoming the next targets of the cartel.  On the contrary, miners in the non-cartel pools would be tempted to join the cartel.

Even if the cartel used its majority power to impose a change in the halving schedule, I bet that most holders would hide their fears and speak out in support of the change, "because it strengthens the security of the network", "because it avoids a fee hike that would be fatal for bitcoin's adoption", etc..  They would do that precisely to preserve the value of their investment.
 

Well, you can believe what you want.  Considering how the protocol is supposed to work, decentralization of mining is much more critical than decentralization of relay nodes.  As long as a client has access to one honest relay node, he will get and recognize the true blockchain, no matter what all the other nodes do; and he can drop any nodes that he suspects are trying to fool him.  Whereas every client is forced by the protocol to use the blockchain that is being maintained by the majority of the miners, and cannot selectively "drop" suspect miners from it...


That is exactly my understanding of what Satoshi meant by that quote.  And it makes sense, too.

Bitcoin isn't about "doing the right thing" - if there exists an opportunity to annoy others but which allows a motivated individuals can effect change, it will happen. Aka, it doesn't matter that you're annoyed. It matters that Bitcoin allows for low cost spam attacks and that this in itself should be resolved.

TLDR; if I were the one running this spam/trx attack and people kept on complaining about how annoying it was, I wouldn't stop - I'd keep it up until something changed.

ok, you test and report the results so that the subject can be improved.
first of all there is a reason why a testnet exists.
second, these so called tests are getting annoying to everyone by delaying their bitcoin transactions, which means it is hurting the users more than it can prove any flaw in bitcoin system.

yes, transactions are way down. however, the mempool size is still pretty big see https://tradeblock.com/blockchain

Bitcoin network work better ... ?

They will generally be aligned, although if pool operators start to act in ways that is not in the best interest of the miners, then the miners will likely remove their equipment from their pool. 
If someone were to actively attack the network with 51% of the hashrate, or otherwise attempt to attack the network, then the short term effect of bitcoin would likely be severe to the negative. If someone were to execute a successful 51% attack, then why would someone want to buy bitcoin? Why would someone not want to sell it until such attack is over? IMO any actual attack on the network that is successful will have very serious short term effects on the price of bitcoin. I don't think simply having 51% of the network alone would have any serious impact other then that miners will likely migrate away from that pool.
These types of things are not without risks. From the looks of it, the recent issues with the soft fork and f2pool mining invalid blocks cost them >100 BTC, although they claim it was less. The fact that they have not stopped SPV mining would imply that they made in excess of what they lost in additional mining revenue as a result of their SPV mining, probably from winning orphan races and from being able to mine additional blocks they would not otherwise be able to mine.

Pool operators are going to want to maximize the long term revenue of their pool. If they take actions that result in losses to them or their miners then their long term profit potential is not going to be great.
Owning 51% of the network hashrate in itself is not a major issue, the problem lies when a single entity starts to actually attack the network after they reach such a percentage. Even if they were to disguise their found blocks as belonging to other entities, it should still be fairly obvious when they are executing some kind of 51% attack.
Are all the miners who mine on chinese pools chinese? Probably not. If they were then I don't think it would be nontrivial for them to move to a non-chines pool. Could the Chinese government force the Chinese pools to do something like block all transactions to/from the address "1censorship...." however this would likely eventually (more likely quickly) leak and it will quickly be apparent it would be in the miners best interests to stop mining on those pools. This risk is similar regardless of where the pools are located politically.
I don't think they would form a cartel. Forming such a cartel would have similar negative effects that a 51% attack would have. It would also be difficult for any of the parties to have any substantial leverage in negotiations because of how easily various miners can leave the various pools.

The various pools also have incentives to get as much of an advantage over other pools as possible. Forming cartels would take away from those advantages.

Satoshi was very unhappy about the prospects of GPU mining and called for a moratorium on such programs until bitcoin was better established.