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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 bett

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.

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.