Re:Hidden surprises in the Bitcoin blockchain and how they a...
by JohnTHaller on Saturday August 23, 2014 @05:39PM
(#8216943)
Couldn't a bunch of folks severely interfere with the already-slow processing time for bitcoin transactions by sending large encoded bits in transactions back and forth between a few addresses, making the already-unwieldy bitcoin blockchain (24.1GB and counting in the Windows client) grow even more unwieldy?
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Hidden surprises in the Bitcoin blockchain and how they a...
by michaelt on Saturday August 23, 2014 @06:05PM
(#8216998)
According to [1] in the default client there's a fee of 0.0001 BTC per thousand bytes. That's US$0.05 so for a million dollars you could add 20 gigabytes to the blockchain.
Of course, in the default client will also only generate 750,000 bytes per block, and the block rate is about 6 per hour, so the blockchain shouldn't grow by more than 0.1 gigabytes a day. And if it takes 200 days to execute a denial of service attack, people might notice the attack and adjust fees or limits to make the attack more expensive.
With that said, presumably if bitcoin becomes widely used (and appreciates in value) there will be many more transactions (requiring larger block sizes) and the transactions will be much smaller (requiring smaller transaction fees). So if you think you might want to perform a denial of service attack in the future, invest now!
Re:Hidden surprises in the Bitcoin blockchain and how they a...
by marcell on Saturday August 23, 2014 @05:43PM
(#8216950)
Each bitcoin transaction incurs a small, per-byte fee that makes this expensive. A typical 200-byte transaction fee is around $.01, depending on a variety of factors (coin age, network traffic, which miner finds the block, etc.)