[Bitcoin-development] Fee drop

Peter Todd pete at petertodd.org
Tue Feb 25 04:41:16 UTC 2014


So, just to be clear, we're adding, say, a memory limited mempool or
something prior to release so this fee drop doesn't open up an obvious
low-risk DDoS exploit.... right? As we all know, the network bandwidth
DoS attack mitigation strategy relies on transactions we accept to
mempools getting mined, and the clearance rate of the new low-fee
transactions is going to be pretty small; we've already had problems in
the past with mempool growth in periods of high demand. Equally it
should be obvious to people how you can create large groups of low-fee
transactions, and then cheaply double-spend them with higher fee
transactions to suck up network bandwidth - just like I raised for the
equally foolish double-spend propagation pull-req.

Of course, there's also the problem that we're basically lying to people
about whether or not Bitcoin is a good medium for microtransactions.
It's not. Saying otherwise by releasing software that has known and
obvious DoS attack vulnerabilities that didn't exist in the previous
version is irresponsible on multiple levels.

-- 
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
0000000000000000b28e2818c4d8019fb71e33ec2d223f5e09394a89caccf4e2
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