by a difficulty increase and people making transactions?
Wait this looks normal to you? Going from 10k unconfirmed transactions to 65k in under 12hrs? Or you just trolling?
https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-count?timespan=24h
No, I'm not trolling. Some simple math:
Say the network capacity is 15000 transactions per hour before the difficulty increase. Now the difficulty jump reduces capacity by 17%. So now capacity is 2550 transactions per hour less. Now assuming transaction demand remains the same, in 12 hours you'll amass 30k transactions above capacity which go into the mempool.
So that alone explains more than half of the effect. No need to postulate a "spam attack". Any slight (10%) increase in demand at the same time would account for another 18k transactions making that 48k transactions, almost your measure 55k.
Wait even with you math, a sudden consistent spike of 10% in volume across the board right at the time of difficulty adjustment looks normal to you?
Now just a hypothetical, if you had limited resources and were to trying to spam the blockchain how exactly would you approach or perhaps time your attack?
we might be sending real users away to altcoins/paypal/...I'm not ruling out a spam attack, what you say is correct.
I just don't like the going from "woah, there's 50k tx in the mempool" to "it must be a spam attack" when any 10% fluctuation in demand would explain it because this "jumping to conclusions" is really diverting the view from the actual problem we have here: namely that we might be sending real users away to altcoins/paypal/....
I don't want that happening, but I'm pretty sure it is.
Postulating a spam attack (because it doesn't look "normal") everytime we hit the usage ceiling negates the existence of this problem and effectively diverts energy from solving it. I offered a different view that explains what's happening as quite "normal" so we can focus on the problem at hand: not enough capacity.
Seems like you are trying to ignore the evidence that seems quite apparently a spam attack, and to the extent that there is any kind of capacity issue, seg wit seems to be a pretty good ready-to-go solution - hopefully, we can get that going soon and maybe that even could address some of the capacity issues and maybe even ameliorate some of the kinds of apparent attacks that are taking place... I will concede that seg wit does seem to be so close, yet so far because it seems to be taking miners quite a bit of time to update their software, since signaling still seems to be under 30%...
That's funny cause actions like these cause the exact opposite reaction in me. Like every time there's blatant spam attack some BU supporter hilariously attempts to claim that it's normal organic growth. To a point where they lose all credibility and i find myself automatically starting to assume that it's shilling. Not that it can't be organic growth just because there's so much attempt at disinformation as if someone is trying too hard
The sad state of the bitcoin community.
2 camps and no meaningful discussion can take place because both sides assume the other side to be somehow evil.
Probably "assumptions of evil" begin to percolate when some folks attempt to describe something that is clearly spam as "organic growth" and then attempt to spin that there is some capacity issue. Hm? I wonder what would be a quick emergency solution to address these "organic growth" issues? Maybe it is a more subtle attempt to try to get some kind of immediate hard limit increase in the blocksizes, while refusing to acknowledge that seg wit is already there as a great next step forward?
