Also, what would happen if you flooded the system (neighboring bitcoin nodes) with 1000s of random guesses?
Random guesses? After several invalid transactions, they would've banned you.
I do
not know any way how they could ban anyone. But it wouldn't be necessary. verifying that a message is false and ignoring it is a really really quick operation.
And Kwothe117, you would not have to send your false guesses to the network. You could just check if your random guess is correct by yourself on your own computer. It would be much faster too.
Then if your random guess is correct you could broadcast it and it will be accepted in to the blockchain...
If you are flooding neighboring bitcoin nodes (nodes your node is connected to) with 1000s of random guesses they could disconnect you and ban your IP from connecting to them.
As you say though, there is no reason to flood neighborhood nodes like that with random guesses to determine they are invalid.