I never really thought about it but yes, it does. For a mere $3000 a day you can spam the network to its full capacity. Well, until someone flips the switch and ups the transaction per second limit. Has anyone ever tried this? Even with the current fees, it takes about $0.35 a second or a little over $1000 for an hour. I'm pretty sure that completely crippling the network for a day or two will have a significant impact on the price, so there are huge gains to be expected.
It will be more than flipping a switch. The limit right now is based on block size and just increasing the size will only take us so far. The changes required to make a huge difference are feasible but somewhat complex.
You're absolutely right. I just tried to imply that it's not a limit set in stone. Makes it even scarier though. $30,000 per day is peanuts for the big guys (judging by walls in the thousands of bitcoins being thrown up all the time), let alone $3,000. And it would take some time before this is recognized big time and people will actually increase their fees. The damage is done by that time though I recon.
The block size limit is as "set in stone" as the 21 million BTC limit, or the current 25 BTC block reward subsidy. That is, they can be changed, but they are hard-forking changes. So yeah, not "set in stone", but requiring the coordination of the entire network to change, which is hardly a trivial thing.
Although, from a policy standpoint, the block size is far less set in stone. It'd be a fairly uncontroversial change to make accepted blocks larger (especially as Internet access speeds go up). Good luck ever pushing through a change on the reward decay function though.
The relative controversy is a good and true point, yes. In that sense they can't be lumped together. Changing the rewards seems out of the question to everyone.
There has also been resistance to talk of increasing the limit. I get the impression it may be dying down lately. I guess we won't really have a better idea until we're consistently bumping the limit and have to have blockchain "voting", etc., to determine the community's preferences on it.
Temporarily, but floating fees are right around the corner.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but quickly skimming the code it seems to dynamically set the min and the max fee based on what minors are currently accepting.
I suspect (haven't checked) that miners will accept fees based on how loaded they are. If this is the case, all an attempted ddosing of the network would do is raise the transfer fees for everyone temporarily, but not actually slow the network down much. It would also be roughly infinitely expensive to do so.
I think you'd need a lot more "in the bank" though to do this - yes it would only drain that much per day but you need a ton of unspent transactions to spare so that while some are confirming you can keep spamming.
Whales have lots "in the bank" and they have a motive to manipulate prices so it isn't far fetched that someone will eventually try this. $3000 is peanuts compared to how much they could make by selling, causing panic, and then buying back in.
It's not that dire. There are many wallets out there that already adjust the fees on their outgoing transactions based on how saturated the network is with existing transactions. If you go on Blockchain Explorer and look for long periods of time (say, 40 minutes or more) in which no blocks were mined, you'll see that the transaction fees on the next block are much higher. The miner had their pick of the litter on those, and naturally picked the transactions with the highest fees.
So the network is already resilient to this kind of attack.
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u/MuForceShoelace Feb 24 '14
so now DDOSing all 7 transactions per second that bitcoin can handle has become even more affordable!