Topic: BTC network spam (Read 248 times)

Cyber Security Is A Business Risk, Not Just An IT Problem

It's a possibility that this is an attack but the effect of transaction fees becoming too large can't be solely attributed to a potential attack. Thing is, there's a growing demand to put transactions on the blockchain and this is definitely an important contributing factor. There is no denying that bitcoin can't take many transactions, especially not as many as a scalable centralized system would.

However, current events aren't necessarily devastating for bitcoin. It's been like that throughout its price rise. It's quite funny, actually. Because as bitcoin increases in value, all transaction become more expensive. There's an inverse relationship between its success as a tool for speculation and usability as currency. As one becomes better, the other worsens. Hopefully spam and scalability are going to be addressed though.

Spamming the BTC network "forever" would need extremely high amounts of money which would have to be used just to disrupt the network.
I can't imagine anyone had such a big interest in raising fees a few dollars, that he would spend those massive amounts of money.
The last "spam attack" was initiated so that people thought BTC is no longer usable as currency. That basically was a marketing gag for Segwit2x, BCH, ...
None of these block-increasing solutions will solve the problem in long term. Scalability is the keyword.
We have to wait for a second layer solution (e.g. lightning network) to get rid of those high TX fees.

There is no difference between a spam transaction and a non-spam transaction (at least, on a technical level).
If a spammer wants to push up the fees, or fill the blocks with his spam transactions slowing down the confirmation of "normal" transactions, he has to outbid the fee (in sat/byte) of the "normal" transactions.

https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

At this moment, an average sized transaction would need a fee of 0.00064 BTC (about $5 at current preev rate). An "average" blocks contains about 2000 transactions, on average the time between blocks is 10 minutes...
So, in order for a spammer to completely stop all "normal" transactions, he would need to spend 0.00065*2000*6*24 BTC per day in fees.
In total, it would cost 188 BTC/day for a complete attack (about $1.5million at current preev rate). But even in this case: if the user raises his fee to 290 sat/byte, the spam transactions at 280 sat/byte would just sit in the mempool untill all "real" transactions are included into blocks (or untill they're dropped from the mempool).

I wouldn't worry about this... There is no real security thread, it's just a nuicence. You'll either have to wait, temorarry switch to altcoins or use a higher fee untill the spam attack is gone. Spam attacks have been happening many times over the last couple of years, sometimes they last a couple of days/weeks, but they always end eventually.

We have some problem with cyber sequrity

Not really, the community is working on getting rid of the spammers. There is a huge amount of community which doesn’t want BTC to float in the air and can get the environment a peace of ease. But if you keep your patience I believe this too shall pass and it’ll be just like the old days as smooth it used to be. And those who are flying away with the money of people they must be putted behind the bars via cyber security.

OK so I think I'm buying that this crazy slowdown in transaction times and increase in fees is a temporary spam attack, along with a (temporary?) loss of miners.  But what I didn't realize is just how fragile this network really is.  If someone wanted to screw it up forever and bring BTC down to zero, couldn't they just spam it forever?  I don't think people could live with this for very long.  What say you? 
I'm a newbie but I managed to get out for $1500 of the drop and bought some again last night...so at least I did that right!  But now I still have it on the exchange because I don't want to wait multiple days for transfer.  Don't like that too much