Last month a venture calling itself "Coinwallet" flooded the Bitcoin network with spam in what the company called a "stress test." The spam delayed underpaying transactions without fees insufficient to secure space to be confirmed in a block resulting in a scenario where a fee market for block space could develop. A Coinwallet representative recently stated the company will be performing another stress test in early September, claiming there will close to 4.6 GB worth of spam that will flood the network.

The representative also stated the primary motivation of the stress test: "We feel that our tests might prove to be the catalyst that propels the core developers and miners to implement the required hard fork that is desperately needed." After Mike Hearn's declaration of war earlier this week, economic support for XT by node operators and miners has been negligible to  non-existent though it appears large number of pseudonode instances purporting to be XTCoin favorable have appeared on AWS. Coinwallet's latest tantrum for this attack has illustrated an unsolved problem with the mempool the XTCoin leaders are unwilling to directly address.

Currently a Bitcoin node will allocate as much memory as the hardware can physically allow as the mempool grows. As the size of the transaction mempool approaches infinity, computers having finite resources, will experience out of memory exceptions. Or as asciilifeform eloquently states:

19:14:46 ascii_field:gotta evict from cache or crash
19:15:32 ascii_field:unbounded data structure + finite ram == barf

Although the development of a quality solution to this problem is not an easy task, Mike Hearn believes increasing the block size is clearly the best solution since currently, "Bitcoin Core has no code in it to handle a permanent and growing transaction backlog. Transactions just queue up in memory until the node runs out." The tunnel vision on increasing the block size serves as a distraction from the real technical issues plaguing Bitcoin, issues which the real foundation is hard at work solving.