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If you win the lottery, how will you spend it?
A new house can be, or a car. A hot summer vacation for a sunny beach, at least.
I will bet good money, however, its use to attack bitcoin will be low in the list.
Well, ten years ago, someone burnt good money.
On this day: 2015
You must already know that Debate on transaction filtering It has been going on for years. More than a decade, even.
It was around this time in 2015 that a mysterious user, or a group of users decided to take cases into their own hands.
What a unit going by coinwallet.eu started executing it It has been told As “supreme bitcoin stress test”. They were going to systematically spam the chain with dust transactions and to fill each block up to the brim, the fee in this process while driving the sky high, while increasing the waiting time for legitimate users.
Coinwallet.eu hoped to showcase that the 1MB block size of bitcoin was very small, and eventually convince the community to increase it. Eventually, if spamors could overload the block of bitcoin cheaply, they could do someone else in someone else.
The campaign caused havoc to the network, with the number of unconfirmed transactions. ,Source,
recently blog postBitmex Research wrote:
“The argument was that at a certain fee rate, filling the 8MB block with spam would cost much more than filling the 1MB block. The small inhibitor for this argument was that the big blockers did it backwards, if spam, it was all running quickly and did not stop the spammer cheaply, but did not win the spammer.”
“In addition, if the block limit was increased, the fees would decline, which would make spam cheaper. However, a major metric for big blockers was how much money would be spent in fees for filling a block. This number would be considered very low to secure bitcoin and would help to increase this price more flexible to increase the limit to block.”
Coinwallet.eu launched his campaign in four attacks between June and September 2015.
The first really failed. It was a transaction data of 1MB value every five minutes, causing a backlog 241 block of transaction (1.67 days). There will be a 241MB unconfirmed transaction in Memapool till that point.
But after spending 2 BTC ($ 500, then, $ 235,800 now), their server started crashing below the weight of a mempool which was just 12 MB.
The second five days later came and was more effective, and even managed to convince a user that large blockers could have a point.
Marecek666 was not happy about the spam campaign.
Coinwallet.eu never clearly took responsibility for the third wave, but it was assumed that the group was responsible.
Between 7 and 11 July, as a result of the attack, there was a backlog between 27,000 and 80,000 transactions, with several dusty transactions (0.00001 BTC) along with famous wallets such as Wikelix and Watt, as well as direct public major addresses such as “cat” or “dog” were sent.
The motherboard calculated that overall attackers spent 30 BTCs for flooding to the network for the third wave, priced at $ 8,000, but currently over $ 3.5 million. The undo the backlog means that F2pool will need to strengthen the bulk of spam output with the number of 1MB transactions.
The fourth attack of coinwallet.eu came months later in September, when it posted thousands of private keys for bitcointock, each one linked a 200 BTC address with a sliced address.
The users arrived to collect free coins, presenting 90,000 transactions. Many of them belong to the same bitcoin, so they can be easily abandoned by miners, which can reduce the effectiveness of the attack.
Coinwallet.eu then gave up, including the action of miners, pools and major players Gregory MaxwellReduce any adverse effects at a large scale at a large scale.
As Bitmex reports, the situation is closely sung Discussion of modern day On the role of node runners in filtering certain types of transactions, at that time the emphasis was laid on the widespread use of filters to suppress the spam of coinwallet.eu with Luke Dashjar.
It is still unknown who was behind coinwallet.eu, with principles including garald cotton and Big blocker Craig Wright. In any case, an academic Study Concluded that at the peak of the campaign, there were slightly less spam (385,256 out of 1.65 million) in the 10-day period at the 10-day period. This increased the fees 51% (45 to 68 sats/byte) and the processing delayed 7X (about 20 minutes to 2 hours and 45 minutes).
“It indicates that an opponent who is ready to expand a minor amount of bitcoin (at least $ 49,000 USD), to pay high fees, can do the bitcoin dos,” the authors found.
And there is a kicker. Four attacks actually executed in 2015 – to execute bitcoins worth only $ 49,000.
Today, with bitcoins at a high level of all time, those 201 BTCs will get approximately $ 24 million, which is equivalent to a jackpot lottery award and is sufficient to buy several holidays for a house, a car and far-flung foreign beaches. Oops.
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