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RaiBlocks transactions do not have fees and are processed instantly, so what protects the nodes from being flooded of tiny transactions?
How does Nano protect itself from transaction flooding attacks?
Answers
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From the wiki page, each transaction will be required to do around 5 seconds of Proof of Work, which will only require around 1 microsecond to validate. This means that the attacker will waste a large amount of resources while the nodes waste a very small amount.
What's preventing the attacker to modify the source code, to bring 5 seconds down to 1 microsecond? – ReneFroger – 2018-01-05T15:23:53.907
Nothing prevents it, he could send complete junk data infact. But the nodes only take 1 microsecond to verify it is trash data. If he wants to send something valid he must do the 5 second PoW or the other nodes will notice it is falsefied data with their 1 microsecond verification. – Cedric Martens – 2018-01-05T15:35:34.363
That's not the detailed reply I hoped for. My C++ profiency is limited, but how could you verify he did 5 seconds PoW, instead of 4.9 seconds PoW, for example? – ReneFroger – 2018-01-05T20:07:07.783
The 5 second Proof Of Work, is not an absolute value but an approximation. Bitcoin wants the network to solve blocks at an interval of around 10 minutes. If you check a block explorer you will notice that this is simply an average, sometimes there is only 7 minutes between two blocks sometimes 15. From my understanding the PoW should take around 5 seconds for someone to send valid data. One follow-up question that could be asked here which I do not know the answer is "How does the RaiBlocks network estimates 5 second PoW to send a valid transaction?" – Cedric Martens – 2018-01-06T00:45:52.070
The problem I see is how Raiblocks network protect itself against an attacker sending multiple valid transactions to accounts they control. The answer provided at the aforementioned wiki page is not satisfactory. It doesn't matter the ratio between verification and generation time. The issue is: will the network store all this data???? – Mark Messa – 2018-01-17T00:22:24.260