Topic: Are we stress testing again? - page 19. (Read 33163 times)

Well the transactions are going to charity although it seems to be causing a mess
I was wondering when people refer to the backlog where do you find the chart that measures the amount of data.
Just wanted to check if I was looking at the right place https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

The first test was done by a bunch of volunteers recruited informally through an /r/bitcoin thread.  Each volunteer tried to spam transactions on his own, within a specified 1-hour window (that became 2-3 hours actually) on a Friday night.

The second test, about 2 weeks ago, was started by an entity called "coinwallet.eu".  They described their plans on /r/bitcoin.  They had a 5000 euro budget.  That attempt was aborted after spending ~500 euros because their scripts/servers could not handle the load.  They also realized that their fees were too low.  They promised to retry in a couple of weeks.

This must be their promised retry.  Their goal is to get 250 MB of unconfirmed transactions in the queues.  They got already over 100 MB and the backlog is still growing.  The network could theoretically process 1 MB (~2500 tx) every 10 minutes, but the miners have been processing only ~0.5 MB (~1300 tx) of transactions per block, on average, even when the queues are fulll; and the normal traffic has been using ~0.32 MB (~800 tx) lately.  Therefore, once the test traffic ends, it will take ~1400 blocks (~10 days) to clear the backlog.

Apparently they are sometimes using more than the standard fees, but (most of the time) they don't seem to be adjusting the fees to aggressively keep normal traffic blocked.  That is, legitimate transactions that pay 2-3 times the standard fee are apparently able to jump the queue and get confirmed in the next block or two.

Not all the extra traffic is theirs.  Many of their transactions send many very small amounts to Wikileaks, charitable organizations, or addresses with well-known private keys.  As the recipients of those micro-donations collect them, their transactions add to the test traffic.

This problem was addressed and fixed with litecoin years ago.

LTC dev, Coblee advised bitcoin devs about this but no one listened.

If this problem persists, there is an alternative coin on standby ready to go.

Lots of this discussion in the recent empty block thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/empty-blocks-1085800

Yes, I also think that, unfortunately, Bitcoin is not ready yet.

Quickseller, I tend to disagree.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Last blocks (chain.so, sorry for the not-so-great formatting)

So while some pools "do their best" and process up to 999.96 Kb (!!!), some get the easy "finder's prize" and that's all.
Is it me or this can / has to be fixed and fast?

If all pools would have been .. fair with the network, all should have gotten as much as possible and the stash of "unconfirmed" would have dropped to normal by now, without bigger block size.

edit: improved the formatting

Maybe that was the case. Btw where are you viewing the current mempool of the network? I'm seeing 73.00 MB here in tradeblock.

Because your transaction most likely has a higher ratio of fees to bites the transaction will fill up.

As of right now the mempool is over 126 MB, meaning if no one sends any additional transactions to the network it will take at least 126 additional blocks to clear out the mempool:
I think it should be pretty clear that the obvious solution would be to raise the block limit substantially.

That is odd. Why is mine confirmed that fast when I only put 0.0001 fees on it? As long as those transactions are confirmed, it should be fine all in all. I think, we are not ready for a huge volume of transactions in the near future. As I can see it, we cannot handle VISA-level transactions.

Nope, but the network seems to be recovering rather slow.
There are still 9-10k unconfirmed transactions, most of those being (chain.so tells) ~32h old.

Mine was confirmed within 1 hour, but that transaction was made on the 9th of July, with only $0.03 worth of fee. Is there any stress testing happening as of this moment?

When it was reduced from 5430 satoshi to 543 satoshi? Can you provide me github push about it?
AFAIK it's still 5430 satoshi.

any payment that clears faster then 24 hours with $0.10 fee is incredible. so whatever happens to the attack, you can always clear a TX faster with a little higher tx fee.

And the exchange rate just jumped. This again proved that bitcoin's value is not mainly decided by its payment function, but investment and speculation, both do not require a high transaction frequency, and can afford to pay a high fee to get the payment done when needed

The other use cases are international remittance and drug dealing, again both are typical large transactions over $50, so even the fee rises to $1 (e.g. 0.003 btc), it is still acceptable

he have a point, with the current bitcoin limit, bitcoin can not go anywhere, all major merchants are not willing to adopt something that could limit their poteantial revenue if implementend among their accepted payments

There is no "correct size", it depends on what the node has seen since it has been restarted, custom settings, propagation & relaying delays etc.

Which website shows the correct size of mempool? blockchain.info seems to be giving different number than whats being stated here.

I don't see a reason behind this attack. Nodes and miner will stop accepting 0 fee spam TX and that's it.

Do you mean that this was happened before? And this same attacked hit blockchain twice? They did not update a good wall to protect this attack? But

what the purpose of doing this attack? They will get the effect too for making this attack

Now the dust is meaning amount less than 546 satoshis, not 5460 anymore. So since the smallest output is 1000 satoshi which is larger than the spam threshold, it is relayed and accepted in a block. Also, it pays 0.0002 for the ~500B tx, which is higher than normal (0.0001). So miners 'like' it and hence take it.

A Spam attack does not aim to put spam on the blockchain (there is plenty of it already), but to swamp the queues so as to deny service by hours or days.  With 1 MB blocks, the spammer needs to issue only 0.7 tx/s, at a sufficiently high fee, to keep legitimate transactions from being confirmed.  With 8 MB blocks, it would have to issue ~15 tx/s all at the same high fee to keep those same transactions from being confirmed.

Hard to believe that the let-it-saturate-hooray camp can honestly think that SMALLER block sizes will make spam attacks more difficult.  What have they promised to their investors, that they need to resort to lies and ad-hominems to try to prevent any block increase?

To prevent the filling up of the blockchain and the utxo tables with spam, there is a much simpler measure: set a fixed, hard, and significant transaction fee, say 0.2 mBTC (~0.05 USD), for each output, whatever its amount; and a fixed, hard, and significant minimum output value, say 0.1 mBTC (~0.03 USD).  Any existing UTXO smaller than this amount then can be removed from the tables.