35 sats \ 5 replies \ @antic 15 Dec 2023 \ on: Will we ever see the mempool clear again and 1 sat/vbyte fees? polls
Imagine that the CIA, NSA, BlackRock, or any other sufficiently funded and antagonistic agency decides they want to attack Bitcoin for the purpose of making it hard for small, decentralized node operators and poorer individuals from participating (an attack that only needs to run for a year or so to give them time to catch up and secure a position). What would it take? $1B in fees? That could last a while even as the value of bitcoin goes up. $1B is easily allocated to national security, or if it’s seen as a future cash positive spend for a $3T fund…
Or what if you are a large organization that just wants to grief the open source community into solving a problem that you can impose by spending up to $1M in an attack. It might be cheaper to give the market pain and allow it to resolve the issue than to hire a team to deal with trying to fix things manually. A million $USD is cheaper than hiring a bitcoin savvy dev team and more certain to have an impact in achieving the goal.
The Bitcoin community is an entity that can be brute forced into organic action by throwing money at attacking the system.
Keep in mind that the cost of attacking fees is a rounding error in the daily spend of massive organizations. They don’t have to spend the whole value of fees in a day to get the fees to naturally rise by other groups who demand usage of the blockchain. Subtle actions can have big consequences.
You raise some interesting questions. As always with Bitcoin, there are potential second order effects to such attacks. If the attack doesn’t work - thanks for your contribution to the Bitcoin miners and therefore mining infrastructure. And what if such an attack got revealed for what it was? It’s pretty high risk.
Also - it could become very expensive to really cripple the network- to take up entire blocks you have to outbid absolutely everyone. Otherwise you still have a functional network, just essentially with reduced space in blocks.
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You don’t have to outbid everyone, you just have to supply maybe 10% of the transactions at high fee rates, which makes everyone else panic and raise their fees, that creates a sort of run on the bank where there aren’t enough blocks to fit the demand and everyone is fighting to get in before it gets worse.
Maybe 10% is too low. I haven’t done an analysis but I think a lot of the mempool is still regular chain usage (lightning channels and people taking custody, and people actually using bitcoin for money), and they are scrambling on top of each other to pay higher fees.
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I know what you mean - and it’s certainly not linear. But it’s a free market and crucially it never ends. So whilst panic might set in for a while, the free market decides throughout.
I’m not an expert and not been here long enough, but there is also a lack of history here where block space has seemed properly scarce? For the early years it wasn’t so much of an issue at all, then segwit gave some leeway, taproot, lightning have presumably offered similar relief as the network of users has grown? Even regardless of an “attack”, block space is wholly scarce so this will happen over time even with honest actors, as activity in Bitcoin increases.
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agreed. It doesn't matter what the block fees are, things like Cash App and River are going to need to send UTXOs to users who are extracting to self custody and the more users use those tools to do so, the more they will have to use block space. They are batching so they can eat high on chain fees as part of servicing hundreds/thousands of customers in bulk. For most people, owning UTXOs does not have a future--they will just leave bitcoin in custody and let Cash App and the like worry about on chain shenanigans.
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yup. Just look at what a $7 million ordinals investment has turned into. Bitcoiners are going nuts and complaining every day on twitter about high fees.
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