Topic: 'Attack on Bitcoin’ Claims Circulate as Transaction Fees Climb Higher (Read 1136 times)

I think that's already been done with RSK (if I'm not mistaken). Bitcoin can finally have the capability of interfacing with EVM-based smart contracts. Since the aforementioned solution is a sidechain, Bitcoin's on-chain performance will remain unaffected. Not like Ordinals which are "inscribed" on the main Bitcoin blockchain. There are other sidechains with smart contract capabilities that are dissimilar to the EVM (Stacks, bitVM).

With upcoming network upgrades, I'm hopeful "high fees" will become a thing of the past in the long run. In the meantime, the Lightning Network would be the only solution to keep using BTC without the high costs or long wait times. If only it had a better UX, people would've adopted it by now. Who knows what will happen in the future?

It appears that the conscripts are again back hehehe. I have also read some information being shared in social media saying that there are some developers who want to bring the Ethereum virtual machine to Bitcoin and use this for settlement. This will be very head shaking if EVM on Bitcoin will become a popular alternative for Ethereum because EVM users are very much okay on paying very high fees.



Demand for NFTs has been growing in recent weeks amid rising cryptocurrency prices, and Monday’s $16 million sale of a CryptoPunk—the fifth-most expensive NFT sale to date—put an exclamation point on that trend.

But the top overall NFT marketplace over the last few days isn’t the same one that ruled the pile as recently as mid-February, as the tides of the marketplace wars have shifted yet again. And the latest startup to take the throne can credit Bitcoin Ordinals for much of that shake-up.

Source https://decrypt.co/220154/bitcoin-ordinals-reshaping-nft-marketplace-landscape

When your body gets a virus you get sick as your immune system fights off the infection.  Most of the symptoms you experience aren't from the virus-- they're from the immune response.

Bitcoin has a defense against flooding attacks.  Like your immune system, this defense is somewhat painful even to things which aren't the attacker.  But whatever the attacker is willing to spend, it'll eventually be exhausted and Bitcoin will be free to continue.

Compare to BSV, for example, which removed the defenses... where in a few days >100GBytes was added to their utxo set, their chain is now terabytes in spite of virtually no real use, and the fact that its impractical for anyone else to validate it let them slip in rules that allow the miner to steal any coin it wants.  And these harms remain forever, even when the attack stops.

Is Bitcoin's defense the most that can be done against flooding attacks?  Perhaps not.  Especially for ones that involve conscription (suckering other users into participating in the attack) it may be possible to convince the conscripts to stop.  Unfortuantely, conscription is usually fueled through things like the unbridled greed attached to seigniorage.  It's hard to convince people to not fuck over others when they think they can Make Money Fast.  Attempts to do so can backfire and just give validation and free press to the attack. (something some people have been quick to exploit, it's not that uncommon to find that the very first online mention of some new sketchy thing is anonymous complaints that the thing is being attacked or opposed. ::sigh:

That's the plan. To make Bitcoin expensive so people would stay away from it. BTC is now Wall Street's coin, especially with the approval of spot ETFs in the US and abroad. You can see why see wealthy figures like Michael Saylor and Elon Musk are supporting Ordinals inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain. Miners and the Elite win, while average people (like you and me) lose.

Fortunately, fees won't stay high forever. At some point, the craze will end leaving us with the opportunity to use BTC on a daily basis. Market prices will react negatively when fees stay high for a prolonged period of time. That's the way it works. Ordinals supporters should move to ETH and leave Bitcoin alone. We can't predict the future, so lets hope for the best.

The biggest challenge in attacks like Ordinals is that majority of the participants in the attack don't know what they're doing. You can see that clearly in this post:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/i-need-your-help-5481797

They all fall for the scam and think they can make a buck by participating in a hype. Most of them have no idea what they're doing, nor do they know what bitcoin is and how it works!
You can see here how one person is the reason for "tens of thousands" of spam transactions contributing to the ongoing Ordinals Attack and even they are facing the consequences of the attack with their lack of understanding of Bitcoin protocol (ie. lots of dust transactions that would cost more to spend that he made).

Let me quote myself again:

It would be extremely naive and so "idiot" to think governments could proceed an or their attack with like an (assault tank) !

A typical and first move to (I don't like to call it govs, lets call "Evil") to do is to infiltrate the whole community.. . And when you see the nowadays influence of big govs over cryptos and the level of the ations they can try comparatively the thing is no longer just a theory but appears clearly to be fact !



And to be clear about my point of view, there is no "attacker".. the schema is clear: price start rising in correlation with the activity.. then fees follows too, so the activity is braked which is abviously echoes the price.. and vice-versa again and again !

We are here now:  Bitcoin is already no longer able to sustain to the needs of the network !




just, Jaaaa.. that excellent tweet to laugh a bit ! (or not? )
https://x.com/moo9000/status/1747550937885884479?

One can never know the true intentions of the government. BTC has been soaring in price despite the rising fees, anyways. Miners are the ones who're winning, while the "attacker" is losing big time. It will all fade away after the hype comes to an end. We just need to be patient.

It's a good thing we're not limited to a single cryptocurrency for day-to-day payments. With plenty of altcoins to choose from, we can save money on fees. There's also Bitcoin's Lightning Network (although still experimental) for those who don't want to abandon the premier cryptocurrency. Whenever governments like it or not, Bitcoin will be here to stay for a long time. After all, it's the future of money. As long as it stays decentralized, there should be nothing to worry about.

All these conspiracy theory type of things do not really phase me, I do not believe them. I have been involved with crypto for nearly ten years, and I can tell you that I have heard it all, from FBI trying to stop it to governments trying to block it to many other things, none of that ever came true, media tries sometimes but media is not just one place, some try to kill it while others promote it as well.

So all in all, I think it should be considered fine, we can't really make it work any other way, it just doesn't feel like it could be all that much terrible. I hope that people could realize that nobody is attacking, we are growing, we are as high as possible, it is 40k+ dollars per bitcoin, nothing that gets an attack could grow this well.

That's the problem with this form of attack, there is not centralized attacked with a limited amount of funds. They got regular newbies to participate in the attack without knowing it. And they will continue to have funds as long as there is a market where they can scam each other with fake things they call "token" or "BRC-whatevers".

Since the token market (ICO scam that started years ago) is not dead, I don't see any reason for this scam market to die either.

Because L2 doesn't end with Lightning.  It's also the gateway to the next layers and the things that can be built there.  It's "big picture" stuff, but people are only looking at what they can see now.  Try not to cast a final judgement when you haven't seen the final product yet.

I believe at some point, the "attacker" is going to run out of funds. When that happens, network fees will decline back to the way they were. But increasing the block size, will give the "attacker" more room to continue flooding the Blockchain with "spam". I really hope things settle in the long run, especially if we want BTC to be used as "digital cash" (not a store of value). The current situation will force many people to move to an altcoin with lower network congestion.

Bitcoin's Lightning Network is definitely not an option. Especially when you need to pay a high on-chain fee to open/close a channel. The LN is limited to the main chain's transaction capacity. I don't get why developers keep focusing on L2 instead of what matters most. Only time will tell us what lies ahead for Bitcoin. As long as it remains a decentralized and censorship-resistant cryptocurrency, there should be nothing to worry about.

This whole argument about increasing block size is irrelevant here because the adoption hasn't increased and legitimate usage of this "payment system" is not higher than the current existing capacity to require a capacity increase.

Right now there is a mempool congestion and fees are high only because of the ongoing attack so the solution to that is to prevent the attack not increase the capacity to store more of their spam transactions. After all Bitcoin is not a cloud storage so that we increase the block size so that these attackers can store more of their arbitrary data in its blockchain.

In developed countries like the US and UK? Yes. But that doesn't apply to people living in developing countries like El Salvador and Argentina. The vast majority of these countries' inhabitants are living in poverty. Keeping Bitcoin accessible to everyone is the best way to ensure decentralization and longevity. Otherwise, we'd be creating another banking system where the "Elite" has all of the advantage.

I'd prefer to pay high network fees, as long as decentralization/censorship-resistance is preserved. If you really want low fees and reduced wait times, then I'd suggest you choose among the plenty of altcoins (or "shitcoins" if you want to call them that) available on the market. Eventually, BTC on-chain fees will settle as the Ordinals craze fades away into oblivion. Developers are already considering how to prevent a further spike in network fees, anyways. As long as everything is done in a "balanced manner", we should have nothing to worry about.

Really? I mean nowadays, when you can easily get micro SDs of 1To and 100Mbts line connexion ??

Nowadays everybody is watching the TV over internet!

When developers increase the block size, the node software's storage/bandwidth requirements will increase. People will be forced to have powerful machines (PCs) running Bitcoin Core in order to keep up with the huge block size. This will make the network more centralized, because only a small few (mainly wealthy individuals and/or corporations) will be able to afford running a high-powered node. Data centers will be the ones with the most advantage on the Blockchain, leaving the "little guy" (average person) out of the system.

That's why scaling Bitcoin is a very delicate subject. Hopefully, developers will find a way to scale Bitcoin without sacrificing decentralization. The Lightning Network is flawed by design, and utterly-centralized. We can't predict the future, so lets hope for the best. 

I wouldn't call it a drama though, fees are supposedly low before this whole ordinal, BRC-20 exploit on the code and then causing the fees to go up that majority of us are complaining now. So before that, we can transact with at least 1 sat/vB.

But then when someone see a loophole of the code itself and then advantage of it and think that he is doing good cause, everything was broken.

Now it's on the 150's sat/vB again, in the last couple of days it did go down a bit, not much but manageable to some of us.

Their is something I understand in this drama of bitcoin high transactions fees that we experienced now, but it's obvious that anytime bitcoin price is going up alot of people would like to exchange and make a profit because their mindset always being that the increment will not stay long and die off, so therefore the congestion is being that it follows the increment and some times is not caused by miners but many of us even hope that miners is the caused of unconfirmed bitcoin transaction or makes the congestion of bitcoin that warrant the high fee we experience.

Excuse me I do not understand..  How or in what maner that is giving power to central authorities ??

Maybe that the non popularity and low mining difficulty could open a way to some parties to put influence on it, but what is the correlation between bthe blocks size and this ?

Spamming network could be stoped by simple parades like for example deciding a reasonable minimum fees price ..

Historically the miners have chosen not adopting the block size increase (which in implementation figuring on the original code of Bitcoin) just to assure themselves a good revenue from fees!  Even Gavin Andresen was very partisan to the block size augmentation and just gave up from BTC after that episode!

Yes. I'm aware that raising the block size would make the Blockchain more centralized. That's why I've stated that it should be done in the most balanced way possible. Something like slowly incrementing the block size after a few years would do the trick. That's assuming storage/bandwidth costs decline over time. Between BCH and BSV, I think the former is more conservative with its 32mb. But nothing beats the security/decentralization/censorship-resistance of the original Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain.

If everything is done in a "balanced manner", Bitcoin could reach mass adoption in the future. Again, the LN is not a solution to all of Bitcoin's problems. Let the community decide the path forward for this revolutionary kind of money. Who knows if BTC will go as far as replacing Fiat in the future?

Bcash SV is literally just terabytes of spam transactions. The BCH and BCH SV approach to scaling just made them more centralized. Prioritizing cheap fees only makes it easier for people to abuse the network and gives more power to centralized authorities.

This obsession with mass adoption is a fool's errand. Bitcoin can never be optimized to fulfill the needs of every single person on Earth. Any attempt to do so will likely result in serious compromises that would make it hard to distinguish from fiat currency.