On Mon, Jun 08, 2015 at 02:33:54PM -0700, Raystonn . wrote: > > the attack would be expensive. > > For attacks being waged to destroy Bitcoin by filling all blocks with spam > transactions, the attack succeeds when the attacker is well funded. This > gives well-funded private and/or public entities the means to destroy Bitcoin > if they desire. This is only true after the block size limit was > implemented. Without the block size limit, the spam doesn’t harm Bitcoin. > It simply enriches miners at the cost of the spammers, which is a nicely > antifragile quality.
There will always be a blocksize limit based on technological considerations - the network has a finite bandwidth limit. Without a blocksize limit the attacker would just flood the network until the bandwidth usage became so great that consensus would fail, rendering Bitcoin both worthless, and insecure. The worst an attacker flooding the network with transactions with a blocksize limit can do is raise costs, without harming security. Keep in mind, that at some point it'd be cheaper to just 51% attack the network. Based on the current block subsidy of 25BTC/MB that's at the point where transaction fees are 25mBTC/KB, which corresponds to <$2/tx fees - not that cheap, but still quite affordable for a large percentage of Bitcoin's users right now. And that's the *absolute worst-case* attack possible. -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 0000000000000000127ab1d576dc851f374424f1269c4700ccaba2c42d97e778
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