Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: The severity of the Ordinals Attack is increasing
by
serveria.com
on 08/05/2023, 05:44:12 UTC
There has been a speculation that this attack is going to fade away slowly and there won't be any need for intervention to fix the protocol where it is being exploited by the Ordinals Attack. That seems like wishful thinking now.

As I've feared the market around this scam is growing hence creating the incentive to attack Bitcoin more and with more people. According to brc-20[dot]io website the trading volume of this scam has surpassed $10 million daily with a total of 14,079 scams at the moment.

We can see the effects of this attack on the mempool with the fees surpassing 300 satoshi/vbytes.
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight
https://mempool.space/

This will only get worse as the scam grows and the scammers and idiots trading this garbage don't care about paying $50, $100+ for a transaction if they are laundering money with a fake transaction they call a token that is worth $1100+ or have a chance of scamming an idiot who would pay them that much for this garbage.
Regular users on the other hand do care about being forced to pay such outrageous fees just because scammers are spamming the chain.



The full nodes will also start being put under pressure as the spam will increase cost of running a full node for many reasons. From the increased traffic putting high pressure on their mempool and transaction relays to their chainstate (UTXO database) growing with a lot of dust outputs that can not be spent but they have to load in their memory for transaction processing.



https://statoshi.info/d/000000009/unspent-transaction-output-set?orgId=1&from=1682080884686&to=1683521607397

Both of the above charts show a very fast slope of how this attack is growing in size and severity.

I wonder how much more should we wait to stop this attack? The fees are ridiculous, 100sat/vbyte is a reality already now (if you want reasonable transaction times). I'm waiting for the core devs to respond to this hostile action against Bitcoin. Taproot bug must be fixed.