Where have all the big blockers gone?
Since there are no walls to watch, and price discussion gets boring during sideways skating, let's talk about an issue that I'm afraid will resurface in due time: blockchain spam.
At the moment, the situation is peaceful. Spam has vanished, and tx fees are back to sane levels. There have been several explanations offered for the end of spam, most of which are plausible or have some merit. It might be that it was too costly to sustain the attack. It might be that someone is moving shop. It might be the attackers became afraid to push LN towards success. It might be that Coinbase withdrew support by fixing their unforgivable withdrawal arrangement (either intentionally or simply as a consequence of other choices).
The point is: most of the people on this forum believe they know who the attackers were and why they did it. For the time being, they are defeated. They might or might not have another try at it. I am concerned with a future when some more powerful opponent delivers a spam attack - backed by the full financial power of a small (or large) nation. That could be an expensive way to shut up the bitcoin network, but it can be fairly successful, especially If you can eat up the loss and hide it inside a large budget by slightly cooking the books.
I think we need someoneto come up with a partial solution to the spam problem. My guess is: if such a remedy is ever found (which I'm totally not confident about), it will be a game theory person to deliver it.
It would be pretty unlikely that these spam attacks would go away any time soon, and sure the smaller fishes such as Roger and Jihan backed by some financial and government institutions could be part of it, and sure bigger fishes could try larger and more long term sustainable attacks (even if they are engaging in them at a loss), yet I would imagine that core continues to learn from these attacks - and seems like the system remains pretty robust, even during the spam attacks and even during those periods in which we had to pay quite a large amount of transaction fees making any kind of micro transaction infeasible.
By the way, before December, whenever my BTC transactions got delayed and caught up in spam, they would revert back to me after a few days. This time around, I had three low fee transactions that I sent in early December that were stuck for more than 6 weeks, and I was getting ready to work out an agreement with the intended recipient to send those transactions again, which would have likely cost me a decent amount of money - including some financial risk, too. Anyhow, before I made such proposal to send again, the transactions went through (about a week ago). Whew!!!!
