Topic: nothing to see here, move along. (Read 9417 times)

yeah, the table you put up is wrong.  it shows the max block size to be 776kB which is clearly wrong.  we've had a consistent stream of 950kB+ come thru over the last few weeks. 

but this graph from Tradeblock shows that more recent avg block sizes are just over 700kB:

The only premature thing, was to delete his first post.
There is nothing wrong with posting a theory. The whole point about posting a theory is so people can look into it and tell if the author has made some errors.
Nothing to be ashamed of.

I'm assuming since the original post and thread title has been edited, it turns out this wasn't the case?  Even if the initial conclusions may have been a little premature in this particular instance, it's still reassuring to know that people spend time considering all the possibilities and doing their best to make sure this system continues to function as intended.  I applaud the OP's enthusiasm, but just suggest tempering it a touch and having others check the figures before announcing your findings.  Don't let this prevent you from asking bold questions in future, though, it could well pay off next time.

Well, what if the attacker's block is orphaned, and other pools pick up the now-unconfirmed transactions with 1 BTC fees? Would the attacker be able to prevent that?

Is that possible?

His average cost for spam is 1000 coin/block, but his average income is not 2000 coin/block. Because even there are 2000 transactions with a fee of 1 BTC stay at the top of the queue and get transacted immediately, the rest 4000 transactions might still pay a fee of  0.01 bitcoin, they were just pushed back in the queue, not obliged to follow the highest paying fee. The fee would only rise to 1 coin/tx if all those transactions are willing to pay for that. In a word, the spammer can only raise the fee to the amount of money he spent, the rest is not up to him

And of course he could spend huge and spam all the 6000 transactions with 1 coin/tx to occupy all the block space, then as you said that will only benefit the non-spamming miners, and those miners would still include the transactions that they want to broadcast in their blocks with a minimum fee (like exchange-mining farm cooperation)

Suppose that there are 10 blocks, each with a fee of 2 btc (in future). Now a large mining pool commanding 50% of hash power decided to spam the network and raise the fee for each block to 3 btc. So he spend 1 bitcoin at each block as fee for his spamming transactions, that's 10 bitcoins total, and he mined 5 of them back, his net loss is 5 bitcoins, how would he become profitable?

It also creates/worsens other problems. This has been discussed on the dev mailing list countless times.

Moreover, by dropping the cap you don't really kill the fee market, just change it. Including additional transactions in a block has its cost, e.g. increased orphaning probability.

I am personally in favor of some flexible cap that is adjusted based on actual transaction volume.

higher fees means more miners. These new miners do not want to be part of the "monopoly", but do want monopoly prices.

but there are no pool with more than 17-18% for now, so how can they do this attack? are the pool working together to do this and then split the profit?

if this is the case, this is really a miners's monopoly, chinese miners working together to screw bitcoin is an understimated issue, they can also perform a 51% if there will be a real reason to do it

A pool with 30% of mining power may have an incentive to do this. But increasing fees means the pool with a 10% share increases its revenue without doing any work. So, in an ironic twist, this should prevent a monopoly forming? Its better to be the 2nd biggest mining operation, and let #1 push up the fees.

Is this really going on right now!? and if it can happen it means that the protocol is broken.
Now that you find out this anomaly what are your options to solve it?

I would like to add that at this point i would prefer that transactions have to pay fees depending on the amount of outputs, similar like litecoin prevents spam attacks. I think there is no reason not to handle it that way. A transaction with more than 2 outputs are simply more than one transactions. If you send 100 letters by mail then you dont pay a fee once only because you bring all the letters to the post office in a big box. You still have to pay for all letters. You might be able to save some percent but its very different.

So why should transaction be handled so differently? We could solve the whole thing quick i guess.

I think its not needed to look at if any player has the needed amount of hashpower, we know that miningcorporations in china hold the majority of the hashingpower (i believe i read something >60%) and there is no one stopping them from building a monopoly in secret. Means they will still mine alone but they put money together to spam the network. The costs would be low enough for them to force the fees up and still earn. And since chinese miners most probably have the advantage of cheapest power cost and cheapest way to create miners, the profit the rest of the miners has from this rise in fees would not be so high anymore.

This of course only works when the blocks are nearly filled already, so with 8MB blocks it would not work first but at one point it would work again i guess.

What i fear is this kind of ruling over bitcoin. I mean Satoshi wanted to be free from banks and their rules and now its possible to enforce fees, like a bank would do. Dont like that.

The price of bitcoin didnt drop because of the spam attack, in fact it went up considerably. So i think the spam attack had no real effect on the bitcoin price.

I sometimes read we would simply need to raise the fees so that miners get paid "fairly". This is not possible. Block halving will happen and there is no way fees will back that. If miners could enforce this then bitcoin would be dead by fees.

So there is no way that miners can proceed the way they do. They will earn less. This is nothing new, mining hardware was old all the time and replaced. So a fair payment only will come from adoption. Spamming the network effectively hinders adoption. One can see this easily in numerous posts on the net. And newbies coming to bitcoin, seeing that bitcoin doesnt work, is bad for sure.

Even if the math does work out (which I'm having trouble believing), in all honesty I think you're grossly overestimating the capabilities of the two pools that could possibly be doing this...  and their own block size handling is working against such an "attack" with regular (transaction) empty block solves

This is quite a interesting story. I wonder how this is going to work for them once we have bigger blocks, or sidechains or lightning network, etc.?
Everything is prone to abuse in some way until someone does something about it. It is actually quite possible that someone is being very malicious about this. However, more proof is required as you're just making an assumption that someone is doing it because it is most likely profitable for them.

That makes NO sense.
 
If a block of fees is, say $100...

You could argue that they make
a "profit" of $50-$33 = $17 but
the other half of the network
makes $50-0 =$50.

The rest of the network is earning
MORE per hashrate.  I think others
d4n13, gmaxwell have more precisely
detailed it mathematically.

Thinking it over a bit (beer++)


I think I found your bug....

You fail to account for the revenue of the other pools.  You state the profit per block won but not the loss per block lost.

Proof:


In the end the spammer (Bob) ends up making more money for the honest miner (Alice).

It's a zero sum game.  Bob is the only one dumping extra money into a system that both Bob and Alice draw from.

 

You have answered your own confusion with the bolded part. The one that would pick up "more" miners fee will be the one that owns more hashing power. The miners fee will be increasing because people will want their transaction to get confirmed faster if there is someone spamming the network thus this means that if the spammer is a person behind who owns atleast 38 % of the hashing power then this person will get profit with the increasing fee ( this would be somewhat a miners fee cartel )

is this spamming attack so profitable that they will keep it indefinitely?

how much they are actually doing in comparison to their normal mining activity

it can't be that big, they(we are assuming that chinese are doing this, because of high % of the network in their hand) are already controlling the majority of the minign activity, do they really need more tiny profit?