I also found this interesting - Bitcoin giant BTCC launches priority blockchain transactions
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/bitcoin-giant-btcc-launches-priority-blockchain-transactions-its-customers-1529730there's a bitcointalk thread about it:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1256357.0I can't decide if this is the natural development of bitcoin's current protocol, or if this is setting a bad precedent. Well, to be honest I think its a bad development. IMO, this is proof that bitcoin is losing its egalitarian nature. If you own 11% of the hash, you can demand a premium. Add on top of this that its impossible to determine whether or not these are mafia tactics...
Furthermore, I speculate whether this type of system will ever have a chance of sprouting in the monero protocol. Our blocks would steadily increase in size during a blockchain DDoS (which I guess is the best name for the recent "stress tests"), so there would be a small window for a premium, but with our 2 minute blocks it would be short.
Finally, I ponder what monero can do in the face of a blockchain DDoS. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything that wouldn't be filtering of transactions by pool ops. But I guess after the fact, there could be some outfit that determines which transactions were crap, and could distribute a patch so that blockchain maintainers could "pull out the weeds" from their blockchain by pruning....
My take is that this kind thing is to be expected in Bitcoin given the fact Bitcoin does not have a solution to the blocksize / fee market issue. It is also indicative of a very serious problem in Bitcoin at a very fundamental level. I hate to say I told you so but this is the reason why I sold the vast majority of my XBT holdings for a combination of XMR and CAD. The fundamental problem Bitcoin faces is how to create a viable adaptive blocksize - fee market in the absence of an emission? It is for this reason, rather than personalities, that a solution to the blocksize problem in Bitcoin has not been found. The only viable solution that is currently working in a POW coin is both adaptive blocksize limits (Cryptonote coins) and tail emission Dodgecoin, Monero, Aeon). In the intersection above I am only aware of Monero and Aeon.
Until a solution to the adaptive blocksize - fee market in the absence of an emission is found I must say that Bitcoin and Bitcoin clones together with Cryptonote coins that do not have have a tail emission will eventually be doomed. What we are witnessing above in Bitcoin may infact be the start of the death spiral.
Edit: A DDoS against the Monero blockchain would the require the attacker to keep paying fees in order to maintain the blocksize at a given level.
AM, pleases note that "fee market" should be plural, as both in- and out-of-band fee market
are needed to efficiently allocate the scarce resources of the network.
All the FUD about BTCC is overblown. Peter Todd already said RBF makes this mostly a non-issue, and Lightning will make us forget it ever happened.
The Gavinista big block fetishists (having lost their XT node/block/governance war) are just using anything available as a cudgel to beat up on Team Core, no matter how far fetched (because their intended audience is low-information redditards and MBAs, not True Bitcoiners).