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I recently read the following thing on reddit:
The two transactions for .00000001 BTC are a malicious spam attack. They were sent without fees, which means that if you wallet doesn't allow you to choose specific outputs your balance is tied up until those transactions confirm.
Surely this is a spam (although I can not understand what is advertised), but I can not understand how is it a malicious attack. What exactly can be achieved by this attack?
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The transactions will likely never be included in a block, as they do not meet the defacto bitcoin transactions rules for transactions sent without a fee, detailed here:
A transaction may be safely sent without fees if these conditions are met:
It is smaller than 1,000 bytes.
All outputs are 0.01 BTC or larger.
Its priority is large enough (see the Technical Info section below)
*Copied from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees#Sending*
Since the transactions fail to meet the criteria to be included in a block for free (which is already getting rare), the transaction will likely be rejected on most/all mining pools, though may be rebroadcast by the sender or the receiver. The transactions may remain unconfirmed for a long time, unless the sender double spends his inputs, nullifying the transactions.
The attack is similar to a ddos on the bitcoin network, as the transactions propagate through the nodes which accept and relay the transactions. This does not cause issues with the '7 transactions per second rule' as the transactions will likely not get into a block, but may cause latency if enough of these transactions are broadcast.
It's more of a pester than a malicious attack.
A transaction can be submitted (and resubmitted) via any node running bitcoin, so long as the transactions are valid and signed by the owner of those coins. – Mark – 2014-02-23T01:56:46.613
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I got them appearing (unconfirmed) in my Blochchain wallet again today. I assume it is something to do with the database repair.
Note the comments on that thread "OP is a known troll and the attack doesn't exist." – Luca Matteis – 2014-02-18T22:48:10.070
Thanks, but I do not really know whether to trust this comment or no. My opinion if it is known that he is a troll, why not to ban him? – Salvador Dali – 2014-02-18T22:50:36.623
Ran into this myself
– alfwatt – 2014-03-02T02:55:14.907