Bitcoin Spam dubbed Moby Dick!!
A recent analysis by “LaurentMT,” the developer of blockchain analytics tool OXT, in cooperation with Antoine Le Calvez, creator of Bitcoin statistics resource p2sh.info, shows that the Bitcoin network has had to deal with a load of spam transactions throughout the past two years. Now, in a three-part blog post series dubbing the spam attacks “Moby Dick,” their findings suggest that several major Bitcoin mining pools may have had a hand in this.
Reasons for restriction on Block Size
We are familiar with recent debates on scaling the 1 Mb per block restriction on bitcoin transactions imposed by its Creator Satoshi Nakamoto. The restriction was put in place to prevent DDoS attacks wherein irrelevant information is stuffed into the blocks burdening the system and ultimately crippling it into failure. It has been revealed by “LaurentMT,” the developer of blockchain analytics tool OXT, in cooperation with Antoine Le Calvez, creator of Bitcoin statistics resource p2sh.info that atleast six or seven mining pools are doing this. The additional burden of these false transactions amounts to over 2% of overall Bitcoin network capacity.
Epilogue
It remains to be seen if the scaling of bitcoin increases such DDoS attacks or some solutions are put in place to prevent the problem. Only time may tell.