Who is spamming the bitcoin cash mempool and why?

When looking at the last hours of bitcoin cash (BCH/BCC) transactions I saw a massive increase in low(or no)-fee transactions:

Usually the graph looks similar to the BTC case (see below), just without the backlog of unconfirmed transactions.

Is anything known who did this and why? Is it just to test out if BCH is able to support high transactions volume without problems (fortunately it seems so, with ~20k transactions per block) or does somebody have malicious intentions and is trying to stall the BCH network?

Have people done similar things with BTC in the past?

Stats are taken from this site: https://core.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#8h

Willi Fischer

Posted 2017-08-16T16:07:07.513

Reputation: 35

Do you have any sense of what these transactions look like? It could be that some large organization has just realized that the current low-fee environment is an ideal time to consolidate small txouts, rotate private keys, or other sorts of non-critical transactions. – Nate Eldredge – 2017-08-16T17:05:29.767

@amaclin gave me good hints in his answer. But I know nothing more about the origin or the initiator(s) – Willi Fischer – 2017-08-17T10:33:32.677

Answers

It is not too difficult to check the low-fee transactions in large blocks with block-explorer. Follow the link https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/transactions?q=block_id(479479)&s=id(asc) and press Load more... link several times.

There are a lot of one-input-to-one-output dust transactions like https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/transaction/2ad1135d02924336901d23179d41a74a800da4f2247cf9e66e4cdccf8656f10c

So, this looks like spam. Sorry, I do not have any more information about the creator(s) of these transactions and their goals. You should investigate yourself. Hope my links are useful

amaclin

Posted 2017-08-16T16:07:07.513

Reputation: 5 763

Thanks, this is already helpful. I will not investigate further, it just intrigued me what the intention could be. Indeed, likely spam – Willi Fischer – 2017-08-17T10:34:45.690

Could be the one miner trying to drive up transaction fees. They collect them all so why not.

Dr Spork

Posted 2017-08-16T16:07:07.513

Reputation: 19