July 2015 flood attack

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The July 2015 flood attack is an ongoing "stress test" of the Bitcoin network. The distributed attack has provoked hundreds of thousands of transactions, leaving over 80,000 in the mempool at one time.[1][2]

Some single-word brainwallets ("password", "cat"[3], etc.) have been the recipients of thousands of transactions, leaving 0.00001 BTC outputs. F2Pool has been concatenating these outputs in huge 1MB transactions.[4][5][6][7] These transactions fill up an entire block on their own, and are far too large to be relayed by nodes; they have only been confirmed because F2Pool dedicated blocks to them.[8] Some nodes report having spent over 20 seconds on one of these transactions,[9] leaving sites including Blockchain.info and TradeBlock temporarily impaired.[10][11]

Suspects

Peter Todd had offered to execute a stress test for $7,000[12] but he denies involvement in the flood attack.[13]

It has been speculated that the attack is the product of mining pools attempting to drive up transaction fees, providing additional income before the inevitable subsidy halving.[citation needed]

References

  1. /r/Bitcoin thread 3ck5z9. 80,000 Unconfirmed Transactions right now 8 July 2015. Self post.
  2. BitcoinTalk thread 1113292. 28 000 unconfirmed TXs 7 July 2015. Post 11823370.
  3. /r/Bitcoin thread 3cgft7. Largest transaction ever mined, 999.657 KB. Consumes an entire block. 7 July 2015. This post
  4. Transaction bb41a757f405890fb0f5856228e23b715702d714d59bf2b1feb70d8b2b4e3e08.
  5. Transaction 5d8875ed1707cfee2221741b3144e575aec4e0d6412eeffe1e0fa07335f61311.
  6. BitcoinTalk thread 1112943. New achivement. The biggest tx 7 July 2015.
  7. /r/Bitcoin thread 3cgft7. Largest transaction ever mined, 999.657 KB. Consumes an entire block. 7 July 2015. Self post.
  8. /r/Bitcoin thread 3cgft7. Largest transaction ever mined, 999.657 KB. Consumes an entire block. 7 July 2015. This post
  9. /r/Bitcoin thread 3cgft7. Largest transaction ever mined, 999.657 KB. Consumes an entire block. 7 July 2015. This post
  10. /r/Bitcoin thread 3ckhcj. Blockchain.info is 10 blocks behind the network 8 July 2015. Self post.
  11. BitcoinTalk thread 1112943. New achivement. The biggest tx 7 July 2015. Post 11823487.
  12. /r/Buttcoin thread 3bk12f. Why doesnt buttcoin start its own "stress test"? 29 June 2015. This post
  13. /r/Bitcoin thread 3ci9av. Could the recent attack on bitcoin be the product of a core developer? 8 July 2015. This post