After an eight month streak of hashrate increases, raising difficulty by a total of 231%, the mining difficulty has dropped to 158,427,203,767.3917 (3.1% below the previous adjustment, placing total network hashrate estimates around 1.2 EH/s). During this adjustment period, unknown actors flooded memory pools with several dozen megabytes of spam. Unlike last time, when the spammers made grand claims from behind meaningless pseudonyms, they have remained anonymous this time around; and unlike previous attacks, which merely contributed to demand for block space, this one caused immediate economic consequences, as disclosed previously. The transaction fee total climbed to 726.63690949 Bitcoins, comprising 1.42% of total miner income.
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As Chinese miners asphyxiate, and USG buys up their hardware for pennies on the dollar to run on U.S. taxpayers' mains current, expect growth (or surprisingly slow fall) in difficulty ?
Expect blood.
It won't surprise me if USG finds a way to countereconomically subsidize them in situ in return for compliance.
uh USG subsidizing mining ops in situ in mainland china?!
Umm, what if miners themselves spam their own blocks to get higher tx fees?
They can do this for free in their own blocks… Isn't this a new attack vector? attack of the miners?
Why would they need to? Miners are not forced to make bigger blocks just because they can. They can ignore transactions if they want. This is one of the reasons I have trouble taking the blocksize debate seriously.
You have to remember that not long ago most miners would limit their blocks at 250 KB.
You have to remember that not long ago, the default parameters were changed, and everybody kept running the same code without touching parameters that they didn't even know existed.
Oh wait, that just happened. And again. And again. What else is news?
Not new in any sense, was discussed in b-a back when the "spam attacks" started.
If they ever lose a reorganization, the padding transactions will get stolen by other miners. This strategy is only +EV if you have over 51% of the hashpower.
ah think you mean peetahash
Nope, I mean exahash.
hick