Guys, I'm not legendary unlike most of you in this thread, and I haven't got as much experience with bitcoin as you but I've just got shocked with this BU and SW things earlyer this week, and I'd like to ask for your help to clarify some things.
Before last weekend I was usually reading the forum and posting things about my ideas in connection with the future of bitcoin and banking industry, etc, At the end of last week I was waiting for a smaller amount of BTC. While I was waiting, I have realized that my little amount was not confirmed for 24 hours or so (0 confirmation). I was lucky and have used an accelerator at 0:01 AM, and this helped my transaction to get confirmed in the morning, at last.
I started to search for the forum about the possible reasons of this delay, and as I was digging deeper and deeper inside the threads, I just found the problem of the full mempool and the pricy confirmations of the urgent transactions.
As I'm not an expert, please forgive me if I ask you questions like newbies, but I'm really curious now:
Does it really the case that some groups from China spams the network with transactions in order to raise the fees of urgent transactions?
As I understood, that blocks has limited capacity (1MB) to include transactions. The transaction that pays more fee gets priorized (and there's no problem with this).
I saw that there are different solutions to raise the capacity of the blocks, but there's no consensus about the preferred way forward.
My question is:
If we find a solution somehow that fits for everyone in the system, and can raise the block limit, would this solve the problem of spamming the network?
E.g.: if we raise the limit to X MB, what is the guarantee that chinese groups won't fill that X MB capacity too, in order to prevent the fees from falling back to normal?
Before last weekend, I was really positive about the future of bitcoin, and now I'm really worried. Thanks for your help in advance!
I can't tell you if the spam is coming from China and how much spam there really is as it's easy to say that there are spam attacks, but i feel they are smaller then people think. Even with the current block size spammers could double their attacks to get even higher fees. But for some reason they don't do it. Maybe it is because it cost quite a bit. With a bigger block size it would cost them even more to keep spam as a problem to the rest of us.
Let us assume one block (1MB) consists of 10% spam (0,1MB) and . If they would double their effort to 0,2MB then we would see higher fees for sure. But if we have a block size of 2MB (however we achieved that) then the same amount of spam (0,1MB) would only be 5% and doubling would mean 10% (0,2MB). This is the same as at our starting position, but it would be a smaller problem, because this would leave us with 1,8MB non spam. So still more than enough for normal transactions. It would be very expensive to spam in a significant way. So this would give us some time until we would need the next increase in block size.