The attack on the network is not hostile - page 2.

dothebeats

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Quote from: Quantus on July 10, 2015, 02:56:10 PM

Stop calling it a test.

Whatever it is called, they've already proven a point: the network couldn't handle loads of transactions yet. Oh and it costed them money and time also, so all in all nothing is really achieved in here, just the annoying delays of transactions and unconfirmed transaction backlogs.

Quantus

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Stop calling it a test.

jbrnt

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I agree that the attack has not been cripling to the network. I do question the point of these waves of attacks or tests? If and when this is over, I hope the "testers" would come out and gives us a report of their findings and explain to us what they are trying to prove.

My personal findings from these attack is that we need the ability to add fees to our sent transactions to speed up confirmation. It's like appending another input and output to an unconfirmed transaction, the difference in the appended input and output would be the added fees.

NeuroticFish

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Quote from: OmegaStarScream on July 10, 2015, 01:49:46 PM

I would really apreciate if someone could finally answser my question , I keep seeing a lot of threads speaking about an"attack" however I don't understand which attack is this .
If I understood the topic right then it's a transaction spam how he is doing it , dosen't that costs him money or he is sending Satoshi's ? :/ and how we could prevent this . a block size increase should do the job , no ? take it easy on me because I don't understand much on block size and fork and those stuff ty

1. It should, in theory, cost money indeed.
But from I've read, the attacker made a lot of transaction of tiny / dust inputs -> these cost far less than the overhead they make. And the inputs could have been relayed before the attack with no fee.
Also he/they made a lot of transactions with invalid recipients. -> I think that these get eventually rejected (for free).

2. There are other discussions on this, some pools / miners don't actually include transactions until the 1 MB limit. My feeling is that this area needs improvement before the block size increase.

DarkHyudrA

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Quote from: Quantus on July 10, 2015, 08:50:13 AM

If they wanted to inflict damage, real damage they could have sent all that spam at once.
But the spam comes in waves starting and stopping to keep the backlog in a target area.

I don't think so, sending transactions is time consuming(it takes a few seconds), so it would take more machines on and more money on the wallets.

OmegaStarScream

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I would really apreciate if someone could finally answser my question , I keep seeing a lot of threads speaking about an"attack" however I don't understand which attack is this .
If I understood the topic right then it's a transaction spam how he is doing it , dosen't that costs him money or he is sending Satoshi's ? :/ and how we could prevent this . a block size increase should do the job , no ? take it easy on me because I don't understand much on block size and fork and those stuff ty

anderson00673

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Very funny, saying that it is not a hostile attack is like saying that getting mugged is not a hostile attack either. Hey, the guy just wants some extra spending cash right? I don't know of any evidence that the mining companies are behind this, but if they are it is a shady way to make a buck.

pereira4

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Quote from: Quantus on July 10, 2015, 08:36:08 AM

It should be clear to everyone by now that the attacker means us no harm.
Its been 5 days now and the transaction back log has leveled off between 40k and 50k.
It is clear the intention of this (ongoing) attack is to increase transaction fees.
If the top mining pools are behind this they might even be turning a profit.

EDIT to help others understand:

If they wanted to inflict damage, real damage they could have sent all that spam at once.
If this was just a "statement about block size" Then the attacker has failed; thus the attacker would ether give up or increase the rate of spam.

How has the attacker failed? we have tons of people here complaining about transaction taking ages, if anything it proves we need blocksize increase and LN as well.

dothebeats

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Maybe this isn't done and isn't meant to be an attack in the first place, but somehow a test to see how far can the network go as transaction volume raises. It's true that we have lower number of transactions happening per second in our network, but still even in that low number we are already experiencing some slowdowns. What more if the network faces a huge surge of users and transactions if bitcoin is widely adopted?

NewLiberty

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Quote from: spazzdla on July 10, 2015, 10:51:01 AM

Quote from: Quantus on July 10, 2015, 08:50:13 AM

If they wanted to inflict damage, real damage they could have sent all that spam at once.
But the spam comes in waves starting and stopping to keep the backlog in a target area.

HUm perhaps this is a warning we have a flaw and not an attack.. you could be onto something.

NON THE LESS, we need to act.

If you MUST ACT:
Raise your fees on your transactions, and move on to something more interesting.

NewLiberty

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Quote from: NorrisK on July 10, 2015, 09:38:03 AM

How would them trying to earn a better revenue by sending spam not be considered an attack? It is still a malicious event.

The cost is going to be greater than the revenue increase, unless this is being performed by all miners equivalently.

I suppose some of it depends on your definition of 'malice', it may be done by a non-miner, no one has confessed to it yet, yes?

spazzdla

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Quote from: Quantus on July 10, 2015, 08:50:13 AM

If they wanted to inflict damage, real damage they could have sent all that spam at once.
But the spam comes in waves starting and stopping to keep the backlog in a target area.

HUm perhaps this is a warning we have a flaw and not an attack.. you could be onto something.

NON THE LESS, we need to act.

pedrog

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Quote from: Quantus on July 10, 2015, 09:17:11 AM

Quote from: pedrog on July 10, 2015, 09:10:45 AM

How much is the cost of the attack?

Is there any analysis on this?

I don't trust myself to do the math myself but I read it could be anywhere from 600 to 1600 dollars a day. ~~The higher transaction fees would only cover this if the top 3 pools were working together.~~ (I'm really bad at math)

That's way too cheap for a billion dollar network, almost anyone can do it...

Quote from: Q7 on July 10, 2015, 09:59:09 AM

It goes to show that if one day the bitcoin network grows considerably, it won't be able to cope up with all these amount of transactions coming in. It's trying to a prove a point here whether it is intentional or otherwise, the message is clear we are not prepared for all that.

Changes proposed by Gavin to increase blocksize were meant to be applied in a year or so, I guess they need to speed up the time frame to increase transaction rate.

Q7

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It goes to show that if one day the bitcoin network grows considerably, it won't be able to cope up with all these amount of transactions coming in. It's trying to a prove a point here whether it is intentional or otherwise, the message is clear we are not prepared for all that.

NorrisK

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How would them trying to earn a better revenue by sending spam not be considered an attack? It is still a malicious event.

Quantus

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Quote from: pedrog on July 10, 2015, 09:10:45 AM

How much is the cost of the attack?

Is there any analysis on this?

I don't trust myself to do the math myself but I read it could be anywhere from 600 to 1600 dollars a day. ~~The higher transaction fees would only cover this if the top 3 pools were working together.~~ (I'm really bad at math)

pedrog

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How much is the cost of the attack?

Is there any analysis on this?

Quantus

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Quote from: neoneros on July 10, 2015, 09:01:38 AM

But it is still running and going strong. It was a bit messy, but nothing really bad happened, i have seen bigger problems ocurring with fiat systems. So nothing has been proved other than the blockchain is a robust currency and validates it's existence. Hope it did have some value for the developers, so they can work on it and make it even better. As long as the chain is not broken.

Yes, if this was just a "statement about block size" Then the attacker has failed; thus the attacker would ether give up or increase the rate of spam, right?

sorry for the edits.

neoneros

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But it is still running and going strong. It was a bit messy, but nothing really bad happened, i have seen bigger problems ocurring with fiat systems. So nothing has been proved other than the blockchain is a robust currency and validates it's existence. Hope it did have some value for the developers, so they can work on it and make it even better. As long as the chain is not broken.

Xialla

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Quote from: NewLiberty on July 10, 2015, 08:53:22 AM

Miner revenue is up, but not by much. Fees are still a small fraction of the mining reward.

well, considering that majority of blocks are mined by just few companies, obviously for them makes sense to behave like this. Even fee like 0.5BTC per blocks makes difference, if you are mining XY blocks daily..

anyway I agree, that if there will be some harm behind, all this will be focused to single day or even couple of hours. This looks somehow different so far..

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