Thanks, man! I realized something was fishy and I do manage to get txs through if i set the fee high enough.

I would have though that if this was a legitimate stress test or some kind of experiment the people behind it would have made some announcement. you said that this has been going on for a month, i suspect that this is some kind of spam attack. on the other hand, for testing purposes i could also use regtest net.

I also noticed a lot of outputs that are created are spent inside the same block (this is probably part of the attack logic). But i didn`t know this is possible (seeing those tx it clearly is). Can you confirm this?

I have started testing stuff on the testnet for a week now and I have this question:

Wtf is bloating up the blocks? I see most blocks being full, up to 1mb, and bloated up by a chain of txs that are spent in the same block: as soon as one output is created it is spent in the next tx and so one in a long chain of txs. What is this?

Also what advice would you guys give to a newcomer when working with the testnet? (i have worked with ethereum extensively before and i know how btc works but i haven`t touched the tools much before; atm i am experimenting with bitcoind and bitcoinjs-lib)

My suspicion is that Bitpay is still using bitcore internally but they`re keeping the code private. even if the original team left they could have had new people joining the team and continuing development. Looking at https://coin.dance/nodes it seems that the bitcore nodes count has been decreasing this year and I suspect this is because users outside of Bitpay move to other solutions and since the node is not maintained anymore there are no new users.

@lautaro.dragan I think I might have a solution although i`m not sure how well it scales. I am using rpc importaddress with bitcoind, this adds the address to the wallet to 'watch' and parses the blockchain for transactions associated with it. this will take a while.. but after that you can query bitcoind with rpc listtransactions and the account name under which you imported the address. As i said I don`t know how well this scales: scanning the blockchain for each address can take minutes depending on the machines (but bitcoind is responsive) and I imagine this adds to the wallet db so this will start using storage if a lot of addresses are imported.

I still have to test some things but it seems like a workable solution for querying txs by address (not sure about utxo yet). The alternative would be a fully fledged explorer like bitcore/insight but this soaks up large amounts of work and people will keep these solutions private most of the time.. it`s a shame bitcore is not maintained anymore

Is the Bitpay bitcore node&libs still supported? They look pretty much dead on github although I could start and sync mainnet&testnet nodes. Does anyone know why did they abandon the project? (possibly by keeping following versions private)

Also does anyone know of a node implementation that has similar features to bitcore, i.e. I am most interested in being able to query it for all the transactions to or from an address.