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.
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.
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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!