Quote from: tspacepilot on June 22, 2015, 07:37:49 PM

Quote from: ajas on June 22, 2015, 06:26:17 PM

2) There should be some self-adjustment of fees. Clients should be
able to inquire from the full nodes an estimate for a reasonable
fee based on the current content of the mempool. This would allow for
moderate fees under usual circumstances but would increase fees in
times of flooding the blockchain with scam and would turn scamming
into an expensive exercise.

^^ This.

If my client had warned me about the situation I would not have sent my BTC this morning. 'If my client had said "you're going to need to pay an exorbitant amount in fees if you hope to have your transaction confirmed anytime today thanks to a "stress test" that is currently being perpetrated on mainnet.' I would have appreciated the warning and cancelled the send.

I was going to play a game for 30 minutes or so before work. Now, 4.5 hours later, my BTC is tied up in some unconfirmed transaction. Hey, OP, uh, thanks!

Granted, you may be using a different client, but it is already possible to query the bitcoin core client (and maybe some others) to get a fee estimate (bitcoin-cli estimate fee NUMBLOCKS - where NUMBLOCKS is how many blocks you want the transactions to get one confirmation within). I haven't really used it much, other than to put it on my node stats page, so I won't vouch for the accuracy, but the numbers look reasonable from what I have seen reported on my node.

Considering the devs cannot anticipate when an event like this will occur to put out an alert, nor do I believe it was a serious enough event to really warrant much attention, I think this is pretty fair. Even if it was a full fledged, state sponsored attack on the network by way of flooding transactions, the core client and network seem to be working as designed. Now, whether and how that design can be improved, there are no shortage of opinions and theories. It's no secret that bitcoin is not ready to scale to a global sized economy yet, if ever.