Pages:
Author

Topic: WARNING:network under Massive spam attack. (Read 3466 times)

legendary
Activity: 3514
Merit: 1280
English ⬄ Russian Translation Services
If everyone pays a higher fee then the fees will easily rise tenfold or more from their current level. There is a point where increased fees will only hold bitcoin back. Lightning network has the potential both for near unlimited transactions AND higher fees to miners

Could you expand more on how near unlimited transactions could possibly go along with higher fees?

First of all, the very idea of unlimited transactions is against higher fees in and of itself. That should be straightforward that higher fees make transactions more expensive and thus suppress the desire to transact. Conversely, lower fees would contribute to more transactions since they would be cheaper in that case. Further, as I understand how Lightning Network works, it makes mining somewhat redundant since people can transact off-chain, and the cost of providing payment channels is negligible (when compared mining). That would greatly facilitate the competition between payment channel providers, and thus lead to low or no fees at all
legendary
Activity: 3248
Merit: 1070
There are two types of spam txs.

The first is a block attack vector designed to bloat the chain with worthless
data. The 1MB Cap prevents that attack type. The fee market is the
mechanism that prevents this while allowing the network to remain
functioning with that 1 MB Cap.

The second is a fee attack vector designed to bloat the mempool and
increase the fee price. These automated scripts are specifically designed
to create different fee levels, in order to increase the priority fee price.
The lower priority txs will either take many hours to days to confirm or
be dropped after "72 hours". The purpose is to cause pressure for altcoins
that allow for new P&D schemes.

These two attack types can and will exist no matter what the Bitcoin
blocksize is, which is what Hydrogen was alluding to.

Only post worth reading in this entire thread.

The economics of the fee attack are obvious.  They do not need to spend that much money in order to get the fees to go up.  If they flood the lower fee levels with transactions they are paying smaller fees if the transactions do go through at all.   Also, due to their own attack their transactions spend a lot of time in the queue just clogging up the queue - less cost for the attacker.  If they are really successful then most of their spam transactions will never get into a block and will eventually get dropped.  The cost to the spammer of the transactions that get dropped is zero.

Just take a look at the chart here:

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

Clog up the lower transaction levels and everyone who wants to actually do a transaction will have to pay more.

Larger blocks will not solve this, Segwit will not solve this, the actual solution is already in place:  pay a higher fee for your transactions if you want them to go through.



If everyone pays a higher fee then the fees will easily rise tenfold or more from their current level. There is a point where increased fees will only hold bitcoin back. Lightning network has the potential both for near unlimited transactions AND higher fees to miners.

In my opinion this is the best solution currently being offered to scaleability issues. And Segwit or larger blocks would solve this as it would make any spam attacks much more expensive to the attacker since they would need to clog up a larger number of transactions.

as i see it doesn't make sense for an attacker to spam the network with higher fee, which would cost him money just to increase the average fee for allt he other, unless this spammer is a miner of course which i suspect it could be

i also don't think that pying higher fee is a solution, that's the issue here, segwit would solve the second issue but not the first from what i can understand, i'm curious how they are "sending worthless data"

if by that he mean dust TX with no fee, these will simply be rejected
hero member
Activity: 490
Merit: 501
why "warning" i though something horrible had happened!

and this is nothing new, and it seems like nobody is interested enough in it to do anything about it. miners are enjoying their higher earnings and everyone else is busy fighting over nothing with repeated arguments.

i haven't seen any solid arguments about "Who is doing the spam attacks?" we just keep repeating bitcoin is not anonymous then.
and i am not talking about conspiracy theories or pointing fingers. i am talking about some solid proof of someone doing some serious blockchain analysis and finding where these money for spam attacks are coming from.

The problem here is that the situation is providing miners more incentives not to decide on the question of Bitcoin scaling problem. We are all greedy and miners are just like all of us. The thing here is that miners should not be the one to decide on matter like this. We already see what they can do by not doing anything because they can earn more if we continue on with the status quo. This should have been a big lesson for all stakeholders of Bitcoin and hopefully once this can be solved the same thing should not be repeated in the future. But sometimes people are so weak in learning the lessons of history that is history can always repeats itself.
hero member
Activity: 3192
Merit: 939
Fees today are over $2 to send a transaction. 100k transactions in mempool. Someone is spending a lot of cash to spam the network today.

Gee I wonder why? /s

I don't know much about mobile wallets or hardware wallets but they should alert the user when the network is this congested. With a easy to understand fee calculator/prediction pop up before you send your transaction.

BU supporters are attacking the network.
The BC/BU division is more likely to damage bitcoin rather than any country or sentral bank.
Bitcoin will be destroyed from the inside.
legendary
Activity: 3472
Merit: 10611
~
Only post worth reading in this entire thread.

The economics of the fee attack are obvious.  They do not need to spend that much money in order to get the fees to go up.  If they flood the lower fee levels with transactions they are paying smaller fees if the transactions do go through at all.   Also, due to their own attack their transactions spend a lot of time in the queue just clogging up the queue - less cost for the attacker.  If they are really successful then most of their spam transactions will never get into a block and will eventually get dropped.  The cost to the spammer of the transactions that get dropped is zero.
~

that is not entirely true.
in order to have an effect on what others pay as fee you DO need to pay higher fee or at least a fee on par with others.
the fact that bitcoinfees website shows majority at 101-120 is because many are using old or bad wallet clients that will suggest a fixed default fee of that amount. for example blockchain.info is always going to say 110-120 satoshi per byte.

if the attacker floods the "queue" with low fee transactions they are ALL simply going to be ignored.
for example if there are 100,000 transactions with 100 satoshi per byte fee, i am going to pay a higher fee of 110 s/b and have more priority than them.

in order for a spam attack to be successful and cause higher fees and delays it needs to pay higher fees than what "I" pay. and they do pay higher fees. i have seen from 300 to 600 s/b (there have been 24993 transaction in last 24 hours with 301+ fee)

and it is not just weird unknown entities spamming, it is miners who are filling (wasting) blocks so that they have less space for real transactions.
186704 tx belonging to Bitfury: 3QQB6AWxaga6wTs6Xwq8FYppgrGinGu15f
legendary
Activity: 1176
Merit: 1001
CryptoTalk.Org - Get Paid for every Post!
It's kind of funny to see threads like these made every so often because the price of Bitcoin is going a certain direction. I like how the price of Bitcoin affects the speed of the transactions within the whole Blockchain. Whether the transactions are just slow or if the transactions are really fast, a large portion of the people that spam the network already know that once they get the money they can try to break Bitcoin so no one else could make money from it.
full member
Activity: 182
Merit: 106
There are two types of spam txs.

The first is a block attack vector designed to bloat the chain with worthless
data. The 1MB Cap prevents that attack type. The fee market is the
mechanism that prevents this while allowing the network to remain
functioning with that 1 MB Cap.

The second is a fee attack vector designed to bloat the mempool and
increase the fee price. These automated scripts are specifically designed
to create different fee levels, in order to increase the priority fee price.
The lower priority txs will either take many hours to days to confirm or
be dropped after "72 hours". The purpose is to cause pressure for altcoins
that allow for new P&D schemes.

These two attack types can and will exist no matter what the Bitcoin
blocksize is, which is what Hydrogen was alluding to.

Only post worth reading in this entire thread.

The economics of the fee attack are obvious.  They do not need to spend that much money in order to get the fees to go up.  If they flood the lower fee levels with transactions they are paying smaller fees if the transactions do go through at all.   Also, due to their own attack their transactions spend a lot of time in the queue just clogging up the queue - less cost for the attacker.  If they are really successful then most of their spam transactions will never get into a block and will eventually get dropped.  The cost to the spammer of the transactions that get dropped is zero.

Just take a look at the chart here:

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

Clog up the lower transaction levels and everyone who wants to actually do a transaction will have to pay more.

Larger blocks will not solve this, Segwit will not solve this, the actual solution is already in place:  pay a higher fee for your transactions if you want them to go through.



If everyone pays a higher fee then the fees will easily rise tenfold or more from their current level. There is a point where increased fees will only hold bitcoin back. Lightning network has the potential both for near unlimited transactions AND higher fees to miners.

In my opinion this is the best solution currently being offered to scaleability issues. And Segwit or larger blocks would solve this as it would make any spam attacks much more expensive to the attacker since they would need to clog up a larger number of transactions.
legendary
Activity: 3514
Merit: 1280
English ⬄ Russian Translation Services
The economics of the fee attack are obvious.  They do not need to spend that much money in order to get the fees to go up.  If they flood the lower fee levels with transactions they are paying smaller fees if the transactions do go through at all.   Also, due to their own attack their transactions spend a lot of time in the queue just clogging up the queue - less cost for the attacker.  If they are really successful then most of their spam transactions will never get into a block and will eventually get dropped.  The cost to the spammer of the transactions that get dropped is zero

I could add even more injury to insult

Even if some or most of these transactions come through eventually, the fees paid will still be received by those who likely paid them (or paid to send them), i.e. miners themselves. Since there is a mining oligopoly out there, we shouldn't be surprised if this attack is a combined effort of a few mining groups (pools), which might in fact belong to the same mining baron at that (and we all know his name). So it is a win-win situation for them (him), most of the time, at least. In a nutshell, expect more attacks in the future
legendary
Activity: 2646
Merit: 1137
All paid signature campaigns should be banned.
There are two types of spam txs.

The first is a block attack vector designed to bloat the chain with worthless
data. The 1MB Cap prevents that attack type. The fee market is the
mechanism that prevents this while allowing the network to remain
functioning with that 1 MB Cap.

The second is a fee attack vector designed to bloat the mempool and
increase the fee price. These automated scripts are specifically designed
to create different fee levels, in order to increase the priority fee price.
The lower priority txs will either take many hours to days to confirm or
be dropped after "72 hours". The purpose is to cause pressure for altcoins
that allow for new P&D schemes.

These two attack types can and will exist no matter what the Bitcoin
blocksize is, which is what Hydrogen was alluding to.

Only post worth reading in this entire thread.

The economics of the fee attack are obvious.  They do not need to spend that much money in order to get the fees to go up.  If they flood the lower fee levels with transactions they are paying smaller fees if the transactions do go through at all.   Also, due to their own attack their transactions spend a lot of time in the queue just clogging up the queue - less cost for the attacker.  If they are really successful then most of their spam transactions will never get into a block and will eventually get dropped.  The cost to the spammer of the transactions that get dropped is zero.

Just take a look at the chart here:

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

Clog up the lower transaction levels and everyone who wants to actually do a transaction will have to pay more.

Larger blocks will not solve this, Segwit will not solve this, the actual solution is already in place:  pay a higher fee for your transactions if you want them to go through.

full member
Activity: 208
Merit: 100
lol. SegWit is needed and people till try to deny its benefit. I have just sent 200k satoshi with 80k satoshi and up to new, there has been no confirmation. Hope that my payment does not expire
legendary
Activity: 3514
Merit: 1280
English ⬄ Russian Translation Services
Fees today are over $2 to send a transaction. 100k transactions in mempool. Someone is spending a lot of cash to spam the network today.

Gee I wonder why? /s

I don't know much about mobile wallets or hardware wallets but they should alert the user when the network is this congested. With a easy to understand fee calculator/prediction pop up before you send your transaction.
that's a disgrace for bitcoin... We need bigger blocks here and now, nothing will solve this issue as good as bitcoin unlimited can, that's why I am for bigger blocks. At the moment there are 130k transactions thaat are waiting confirmations and most of them will be returned to senders because the mempool will definitely not clear itself out in a few days. Just imagine how much harm is being done to the merchants and stuff like that, and paying 2 dollars for sending over small amounts of money like 50 cents is just ridiculous. BIGGER BLOCKS NOW!

Bigger blocks might not and will likely not help

As well as shilling in their favor, just for the record. What's the sense of bigger blocks if the miners are not filling up even 1M blocks (today's size). Going for bigger blocks is just miners' pretext to keep things as they are today, i.e. in a state of permanent confrontation, a situation in which they can "legally" extort higher fees. If blocks are made 4-8 Mb in size what will it change if miners can still choose what size to use? Even if it were a solution (which it is not), it wouldn't work out anyway
sr. member
Activity: 518
Merit: 271
Fees today are over $2 to send a transaction. 100k transactions in mempool. Someone is spending a lot of cash to spam the network today.

Gee I wonder why? /s

I don't know much about mobile wallets or hardware wallets but they should alert the user when the network is this congested. With a easy to understand fee calculator/prediction pop up before you send your transaction.
that's a disgrace for bitcoin... We need bigger blocks here and now, nothing will solve this issue as good as bitcoin unlimited can, that's why I am for bigger blocks. At the moment there are 130k transactions thaat are waiting confirmations and most of them will be returned to senders because the mempool will definitely not clear itself out in a few days. Just imagine how much harm is being done to the merchants and stuff like that, and paying 2 dollars for sending over small amounts of money like 50 cents is just ridiculous. BIGGER BLOCKS NOW!
No. It's actually a spam attack I can't show what address spams the mempool just search it on this forum instead we don't need bigger block to solve this problem we need to prevent the whole blockchain against these spam attacks, it just a propoganda to support bitcoin unlimited. Let just hope that the spam attack will be over.
full member
Activity: 294
Merit: 100
Yet another thread complaining about confirmation times, block sizes and supposed "spam". There's nothing we can do except make a move on. Pick a side, or help come up with a solution.

This is getting scary. There's been over 100K unconfirmed transactions for more than 24 hours. When is this going to end? It's also very impressive. I can't believe there's a single attacker behind all this. This got to be a concerted effort with, many, many computers.

I guess BTC needs to protect itself, maybe with a fixed minimal fee, so that spam attack would get more costly.

How are you sure that this is even an attack? With the massive recent growth, this could mean that we have so many people really wanting to give bitcoin a try. This would be horrible, as the current confirmation times and average fees are so horribly high. Technically we could be driving new users away.



I'll just elaborate it a bit. Countries have started recognizing and legalizing Bitcoin and they are major countries not just small ones especially Japan and Australia. Since no one can provide a concrete proof or evidence that this is an attack then it would be more probable to think this way. I hope that somebody has been thinking of solution right noe regarding this issue and be fixed asap.
hero member
Activity: 658
Merit: 500
CryptoTalk.Org - Get Paid for every Post!
Fees today are over $2 to send a transaction. 100k transactions in mempool. Someone is spending a lot of cash to spam the network today.

Gee I wonder why? /s

I don't know much about mobile wallets or hardware wallets but they should alert the user when the network is this congested. With a easy to understand fee calculator/prediction pop up before you send your transaction.
that's a disgrace for bitcoin... We need bigger blocks here and now, nothing will solve this issue as good as bitcoin unlimited can, that's why I am for bigger blocks. At the moment there are 130k transactions thaat are waiting confirmations and most of them will be returned to senders because the mempool will definitely not clear itself out in a few days. Just imagine how much harm is being done to the merchants and stuff like that, and paying 2 dollars for sending over small amounts of money like 50 cents is just ridiculous. BIGGER BLOCKS NOW!
legendary
Activity: 1232
Merit: 1030
give me your cryptos
Yet another thread complaining about confirmation times, block sizes and supposed "spam". There's nothing we can do except make a move on. Pick a side, or help come up with a solution.

This is getting scary. There's been over 100K unconfirmed transactions for more than 24 hours. When is this going to end? It's also very impressive. I can't believe there's a single attacker behind all this. This got to be a concerted effort with, many, many computers.

I guess BTC needs to protect itself, maybe with a fixed minimal fee, so that spam attack would get more costly.

How are you sure that this is even an attack? With the massive recent growth, this could mean that we have so many people really wanting to give bitcoin a try. This would be horrible, as the current confirmation times and average fees are so horribly high. Technically we could be driving new users away.

legendary
Activity: 1862
Merit: 1004
This is no longer an issue of blocksize but rather it is more crucial than that issue. Spam attacks are largely made to destroy bitcoin and it is not only the thing that are happening today several computers are being attacked by cyber attacks. Hope bitcoin will not be greatly affected by this issues and will still continue to rise up and grow stronger.
1. Spam attack won't destroy bitcoin per se, they will however create illusion that bitcoin is not working properly and it is outdated piece of software - altcoins will profit.
2. Other that spamming the network there is not much else that can be done to harm bitcoin network ATM.
3. Bitcoin doesn't care about malware, ransomware or other types of threat normally dangerous to centralized systems.
hero member
Activity: 994
Merit: 544
Bigger blocks = bigger spam.

Neither bitcoin unlimited nor larger blocksize could fix this.

Its not a "scaling issue".

It could be better defined as crypto needing to implement forms of DDoS protection.

This is no longer an issue of blocksize but rather it is more crucial than that issue. Spam attacks are largely made to destroy bitcoin and it is not only the thing that are happening today several computers are being attacked by cyber attacks. Hope bitcoin will not be greatly affected by this issues and will still continue to rise up and grow stronger.
legendary
Activity: 3514
Merit: 1280
English ⬄ Russian Translation Services
Why do you guys think that this is all a spam attack??

1. because of the way these transactions are injected into the network.
it has a nearly fixed rate, which in normal circumstances it can not be the same.

2. because in normal circumstances we have 1000 to 3000 transactions in the mempool and with all the growth and price rise, etc it has gone up but not to 160,000

3. because of the transactions that can be found and look useless. for example sending from and address to same address or sending from 1 address to another but instead of sending 100BTC at once you send 0.01BTC every 5 seconds in a new transaction until 100BTC is spent, then from the second address you send to third address the same way.

Who are the main beneficiaries here?

It is obvious that miners are vitally interested in "raising the bar" (i.e. extorting higher fees), but who can also profit from that apart from them? It should be obvious that this spam attack won't change a thing in the Core versus Unlimited confrontation. There should be at least some logic as well as goal behind this wall or wave of spammy transactions. I don't think that someone would be spending plenty of money to bring Bitcoin network down just for the fun of it
legendary
Activity: 1372
Merit: 1032
All I know is that I know nothing.
Why do you guys think that this is all a spam attack??

1. because of the way these transactions are injected into the network.
it has a nearly fixed rate, which in normal circumstances it can not be the same.

2. because in normal circumstances we have 1000 to 3000 transactions in the mempool and with all the growth and price rise, etc it has gone up but not to 160,000

3. because of the transactions that can be found and look useless. for example sending from and address to same address or sending from 1 address to another but instead of sending 100BTC at once you send 0.01BTC every 5 seconds in a new transaction until 100BTC is spent, then from the second address you send to third address the same way.
Pages:
Jump to: