Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Flood attack 0.00000001 BC
by
lfm
on 05/08/2010, 14:52:32 UTC
What exactly is this 'dust spam' that this 0.01BTC transaction fee "solving"?
Someone with only one Bitcoin could send 100,000,000 transactions, which might overload the network. This isn't a good solution, though -- the vulnerability will still exist when the limit is lowered because someone will certainly be saving a bunch of Bitcoins.

Someone with one Bitcoin can already send 100,000,000 transactions, by repeatedly sending the coin to themselves. How is it any different if the value of the transaction is 1 or 0.00000001 ?

I'd like to repeat that question. Why could someone with 1 bc, not just send it back and forth between accounts a billion times? No fees would be charged.

Sending 1 BTC back and forth a million times creates a single transaction chain, sending a million transactions of 0.000001 BTC makes a million nearly independant transactions which all must be remembered. Due to the way bitcoin can drop old deeply confirmed transactions the first is far less overhead than the second in the long run. There may be similar network cost but the disk space cost can be greatly reduced for the single chain.

Only if the "dust" is combined back together and confirmed deeply enough again only then can the dust space be dropped.