6 ms·

Yes, article is a little confused. For actual information about the transaction, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9861508 https://news.ycombinator.com/i

Yes, article is a little confused. For actual information about the transaction, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9861508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9861508

irickt 11y ago
I read both articles and though I don't understand the mechanics involved I'm left with a big question: Could a a well-financed actor (state or otherwise) simply crash bitcoin with spam?
- sanswork 11y ago
  A marginally financed one could crash a lot of services but the best a well funded one could do with spam is make transactions more expensive for users. A better use of their money would be buying up farms and miner manufacturers and attacking the network that way. A couple hundred million would give you a large enough stake in most manufactures of competitive mining equipment. You could then use this control to route their supply to yourself basically cutting third parties out of the mining business.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    > A better use of their money would be buying up farms and miner manufacturers and attacking the network that way. Spamming enough to seriously impact the cost of transactions can be done for far less than getting most of the mining power. Probably less than a million, depending on how long you're willing to wait to accumulate coindays and other factors.
    - sanswork 11y ago
      You could do it for less than $25k at the moment, probably less than $5k a day if you were clever about the transactions. The second scenario was how a well funded entity could best disrupt it. Spamming transactions is annoying but doesn't really cause too many problems.
      - ikeboy 11y ago
        >Spamming transactions is annoying but doesn't really cause too many problems. If you do it well enough such that there's no simple rule to distinguish them (that could be written in an emergency, as has been suggested), then it seems like it would be a big deal. Who's still using bitcoin when the fees are >$10 per tx? (I think the eventual solution will involve larger blocksize + proper pruning, and shifting costs to the cost-generators by, for instance, requiring the sender to provide the full input instead of storing it in the utxo database, but so far the existing proposals aren't really complete and well-reviewed enough to be used.) Edit: oh, and off-chain stuff like lightning.
        sanswork 11y ago
        Napkin math but by the time you're spending enough on transaction fees to be pushing people into the >$10 per tx range to beat you, you'd be over $1m/day. I think at that point you're better off going with my "buy the miners" plan if destruction is your plan.
      - davidgerard 11y ago
        Speculation on /r/buttcoin is that this is either someone dumping coins and hiding it in the chaff, or a DNM exit scam and someone hiding it in the chaff. The other interesting thing is that the price went up even though the network was literally unusable. The spam demonstrated that the price of Bitcoin is literally detached from any form of utility whatsoever. The exchange price appears to be dictated by day traders only.
        ikeboy 11y ago
        >The spam demonstrated that the price of Bitcoin is literally detached from any form of utility whatsoever. Why should the price track current utility as opposed to expected? If the market as a whole doesn't expect this spam to have a long-term effect, it won't affect the price.
- PhilWright 11y ago
  Exactly. One of the chief benefits of BitCoin is that you can act in an anonymous manner if you perform your transactions in a careful way. This means it is inherently open to being collapsed by a powerful actor that has the resources and will to attack. Certainly a state but I suspect a relatively small group could do the same. Being found out as the source of an attack is the biggest deterrent. Without the deterrent the temptation for a vested interest must be a magnitude higher.
  - nickodell 11y ago
    >Being found out as the source of an attack is the biggest deterrent. It doesn't seem like much of a deterrent. Suppose we knew for a fact that the attacker was John Smith in Chicago. How would that deter them?
    - marcoperaza 11y ago
      Because it's a crime that you can go to prison for. And all of the damaged parties could sue you.
      - northben 11y ago
        It's not a crime to create many small transactions...
        marcoperaza 11y ago
        It is if you do it with the intent to defraud people or to make a service inaccessible. Same thing with a denial of service attack. It's not illegal to visit a webpage, but it is illegal to visit a webpage millions of times per second to bring the server down.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    How exactly bitcoin transactions are anonymous? Sure they don't have your name tagged on them but they are signed with your key. It won't be that hard to do some data analysis on the block chain to expose who's really behind each transaction, if bitcoin ever goes mainstream it will effectively mean that everyone's creditcard bill will become public...
- davidgerard 11y ago
  Even a poorly financed actor could crash Bitcoin with spam. The network was jammed to unusability for a couple of days just now for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars' worth of Bitcoin. That's enough that if you had old Bitcoins you didn't care about, you could do it for teh lulz.

Yes, article is a little confused. For actual information about the transaction, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9861508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9861508

irickt 11y ago

I read both articles and though I don't understand the mechanics involved I'm left with a big question: Could a a well-financed actor (state or otherwise) simply crash bitcoin with spam?

sanswork 11y ago
A marginally financed one could crash a lot of services but the best a well funded one could do with spam is make transactions more expensive for users. A better use of their money would be buying up farms and miner manufacturers and attacking the network that way. A couple hundred million would give you a large enough stake in most manufactures of competitive mining equipment. You could then use this control to route their supply to yourself basically cutting third parties out of the mining business.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  > A better use of their money would be buying up farms and miner manufacturers and attacking the network that way. Spamming enough to seriously impact the cost of transactions can be done for far less than getting most of the mining power. Probably less than a million, depending on how long you're willing to wait to accumulate coindays and other factors.
  - sanswork 11y ago
    You could do it for less than $25k at the moment, probably less than $5k a day if you were clever about the transactions. The second scenario was how a well funded entity could best disrupt it. Spamming transactions is annoying but doesn't really cause too many problems.
    - ikeboy 11y ago
      >Spamming transactions is annoying but doesn't really cause too many problems. If you do it well enough such that there's no simple rule to distinguish them (that could be written in an emergency, as has been suggested), then it seems like it would be a big deal. Who's still using bitcoin when the fees are >$10 per tx? (I think the eventual solution will involve larger blocksize + proper pruning, and shifting costs to the cost-generators by, for instance, requiring the sender to provide the full input instead of storing it in the utxo database, but so far the existing proposals aren't really complete and well-reviewed enough to be used.) Edit: oh, and off-chain stuff like lightning.
      - sanswork 11y ago
        Napkin math but by the time you're spending enough on transaction fees to be pushing people into the >$10 per tx range to beat you, you'd be over $1m/day. I think at that point you're better off going with my "buy the miners" plan if destruction is your plan.
    - davidgerard 11y ago
      Speculation on /r/buttcoin is that this is either someone dumping coins and hiding it in the chaff, or a DNM exit scam and someone hiding it in the chaff. The other interesting thing is that the price went up even though the network was literally unusable. The spam demonstrated that the price of Bitcoin is literally detached from any form of utility whatsoever. The exchange price appears to be dictated by day traders only.
      - ikeboy 11y ago
        >The spam demonstrated that the price of Bitcoin is literally detached from any form of utility whatsoever. Why should the price track current utility as opposed to expected? If the market as a whole doesn't expect this spam to have a long-term effect, it won't affect the price.
PhilWright 11y ago
Exactly. One of the chief benefits of BitCoin is that you can act in an anonymous manner if you perform your transactions in a careful way. This means it is inherently open to being collapsed by a powerful actor that has the resources and will to attack. Certainly a state but I suspect a relatively small group could do the same. Being found out as the source of an attack is the biggest deterrent. Without the deterrent the temptation for a vested interest must be a magnitude higher.
- nickodell 11y ago
  >Being found out as the source of an attack is the biggest deterrent. It doesn't seem like much of a deterrent. Suppose we knew for a fact that the attacker was John Smith in Chicago. How would that deter them?
  - marcoperaza 11y ago
    Because it's a crime that you can go to prison for. And all of the damaged parties could sue you.
    - northben 11y ago
      It's not a crime to create many small transactions...
      - marcoperaza 11y ago
        It is if you do it with the intent to defraud people or to make a service inaccessible. Same thing with a denial of service attack. It's not illegal to visit a webpage, but it is illegal to visit a webpage millions of times per second to bring the server down.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  How exactly bitcoin transactions are anonymous? Sure they don't have your name tagged on them but they are signed with your key. It won't be that hard to do some data analysis on the block chain to expose who's really behind each transaction, if bitcoin ever goes mainstream it will effectively mean that everyone's creditcard bill will become public...
davidgerard 11y ago
Even a poorly financed actor could crash Bitcoin with spam. The network was jammed to unusability for a couple of days just now for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars' worth of Bitcoin. That's enough that if you had old Bitcoins you didn't care about, you could do it for teh lulz.