Bitcoin Halving Spam Attack
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- Опубликовано: 19 май 2024
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In this video, I discuss the ongoing spam attack on Bitcoin, as crypto VCs mint the latest scam (Runes), clogging up block space and skyrocketing transaction fees.
Crypto VCs will eventually run out of money, but what if this were a nation-state attack instead? How many Bitcoiners would be in favor of filtering then?
Not investment advice! Consult a financial advisor.
View the latest Bitcoin blocks and transaction fees here:
mempool.space/
View the halving block here:
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#Bitcoin
#halving
#runes
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Only answer I know is just hodl until the smoke clears.
It's good advice. And consolidate on-chain UTXOs next time fees are lower
@@Bitcoin_University yep, need to do that for sure.
@@Bitcoin_University YUP
The smoke is not going to clear unless block sizes are allowed to increase. If it weren't spam driving up fees it would be regular monetary transactions as BTC gains more widespread adoption. At that point BTC turns into a settlement network for the wealthy while regular Joes must resort to using custodians. I suspect we'll have another hard fork or people will leave to existing scalable forks of Bitcoin.
@@dasherman5150 scam
Hey Matthew, watched the BTC halving on Mempool last night, pretty sure I saw some people spend over $50,000 to get into that block. I can't imagine that this spam attack can last very long, the transaction fees are extremely expensive, even for the VCs as well, and they are likely to lose a lot of money.
Even nation states couldn't do this forever. Running a spam attack is a financial war in a similar way that the US sends money to Israel or Ukraine, it debases the currency. That can go on for so long until the gears of the economy start seizing up.
In any case, BTC is the apex predator. If central banks want to have a deathmatch against BTC then they can go ahead and forfeit all of their wealth.
Agreed.
The battle between bitcoin the network... and fiat was going to happen eventually. This is just round 1.
Your words are like music to my ears brother. All we can do is stack sats and keep spreading the truth which is that Bitcoin is the hardest form of money ever created and if you're pro freedom then you are pro Bitcoin. The first time humans can escape overreaching hierarchies, whether it be kings through debasing and reducing the metal content in their coins or through governments debasing their currencies and diluting our wealth with the modern day version of a money printer.
As they say there are no informed critiques of Bitcoin, only uninformed ones, because if anyone truly understood how the fiat system works and how bitcoin works they would convert before the day is over.
In order to keep the spam up, wouldn't it be necessary to find or buy new Sats continuously to have to pay the fees? Wouldn't this just lead to a cycle of Bitcoin going up in price while basically being near impossible to use?
Seeing the mempool turn purple was like watching an eclipse
That's an amazing way to put it!
This is an important topic. Thanks for the great content and please keep these videos coming.
What a weird world. I could have taken care of my UTXOs sooner when fees were cheap, but I'm very thankful that I listened to your wisdom three months ago when fees were starting to get high instead of kicking the can into the circus act making the rounds in the blockchain right now. Thanks for your great, constructive content.
what u mean take care of UTXOs? What is there to do?
@@bugshavefeelerstoomany people don’t understand these unfortunately and will get burned with extremely high fees.
@@bugshavefeelerstoo I wish I knew
@@bugshavefeelerstoo If you are using the btc base layer and you have multiple small UTXOs you should send them to yourself (ideally in a low fee environment) and consolidate them so you end up with less UTXOs (ideally 1 UTXO). You always want to have as little UTXOs as possible because if you want to move all of your funds at once you will need to pay a fee for each UTXO included in that transaction which could be a nightmare in a high fee environment.
@@bugshavefeelerstoo Search Btc sessions, utxo management on RUclips, great tutorials there.
I cant transfer my 250 dollar btc to cold wallet because of an insane 120$ transaction fees! This has to stop, it is not sustainable anymore.
Swap to something else, like LTC and then send it to the wallet. Once in the wallet, swap it back? LTC fees are super low.
just wait 2 weeks it will be cheap to transfer again
Or buy the real Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash.
Costs cents to transact
@@user-od8ul4mw6d cash is a losing asset, see cash vs bitcoin last 6 years, almost like pesos vs usd
@@user-od8ul4mw6d the defeated bitcoin? the market has spoken, B Trash isnt the answer
At least the miners are getting paid. Maybe making a video about bitcoin attack vectors and possible solutions would help spread awareness!
This was the begining of that i suppose
It's a circle, money gets pumped into this, then a higher outcome will be receives and repeat the process
Is it possible some of these miners in cahoots with the sh**coiners?
Block 840003’s block reward was insane.
Thank you for explaining this Matt. I saw this happening and was wondering what it was. Love the channel!
If a nation state could spam bitcoin in the manner you suggest, and they certainly can, it's not as anti-fragile as has been advertised.
I called David Bailey an Ordinal/Rune Sniper, a scammer and a thief, he blocked me immediately just now!
I said that in the Bitcoin Magazine live chat and they banned me lol
so you slandered someone ... and they blocked you... and you were surprised at this why?
@@jameswlong Not saying it is, but it wouldn't be slander if it's true.
@@MyTube4Utoo burden of proof is on you.
I dont buy from track stars
.... ill pass on runes..... plus prerunes gonna dump on runies heads
Thanks for sounding the alarm. I just hope it's not too late. This is the biggest existential threat I have seen to bitcoin since I first started following it well over ten years ago. Getting the ordinals off the system will be a more divisive than the block size debate but it simply must be done one way or another or the network will be doomed.
You realize this wasn't actually ordinals right? This was just OP_Return spam. The same old op return from 2014. It's nothing new, it was possible for an 'attack' like this years ago.
Ordinals or 'inscriptions' are completely different, they are arbitrary witness data... disguised to evade basic filters. From them spouts 'brc20s' or inscription 'tokens' as opposed to 'nfts' or jpegs.
There is nothing in bitcoin core since 2014 (?) to actually stop these Runes. Even a smaller data carrier size (ie like 40) wouldn't have stopped them.
I very much appreciate your redux on this Matthew! I warned in an interview almost a year ago, in speaking about Ordinals, that there are 3 “Bitcoins” - the Token, the Network, and the Meme (or the public perception). Ordinals wouldn’t harm the first two, but would definitely harm the public perception of Bitcoin, and that this would become an attack vector we as Bitcoiners needed to prepare for. The Fiat children have invaded the Grown-up’s workplace right now, but I appreciate seeing how this has become a litmus test for the winnowing out the Fiat-Minded who have been larping as Bitcoiners for so long. We always need to winnow. Never cease winnowing!
i believe btc is never going to be a medium of exchange. The future is btc as digital gold, store of value. I think that is more than enough. Thank you for your videos.
Yup… I thought this was the most obvious thing to use bitcoin for. Digital gold that you can go anywhere in the world with unlike the physical gold which can be easily confiscated at an airport/boarder.
The idea of using bitcoin to buy coffee never made any logical sense… no one in the days of the gold standard used gold or even silver for coffee etc.
Even if it doesn't replace money entirely, you will still always be able to buy/sell things with it too. So store of value, but still be able puchase things here and there much easier than gold.
It will have L2 applications that work as m.o.e
@@cramsa, you mean before 1965 when our quarters and dimes were silver?
thanks for informing and educating the world about Bitcoin.
I’ve been watching and loving your videos forever Matt, but I think you missed the mark on this one.
Your main response to some of the intelligent criticisms were: “what if a nation state does this?”
How is this a rune issue? A nation state could do that by bidding up “normal financial” transaction fees and this was always a possibility even before taproot.
As another commenter posted, the transaction pool is a free market like all others.
I agree with you it is irresponsible to be promoting these, but putting it in people’s heads that we might need to do something drastic about this is also irresponsible.
I really hope you can make a follow up video, where you think through some responses to the intelligent criticisms of this video.
Thanks for what you do.
if it incentivizes the miners it incentivizes the network to stay online and absorb the novelty that someone else is paying for
It sounds like there is a need to modify the protocol to remove, or at least minimize the effect of spam attacks. If not I see BTC unusable for its intended purpose. If it costs me $40+ to move $100 off of Coinbase, I'll be forced to leave it there, and that's a cardinal sin!
It is not spam. Block has 4m. Miners need get fees for more investiments. Let people spend their money in btc blockchain
It cost me $90 to send $126 😢
Just support an exchange that supports lightning withdrawals. Coinbase is a shitcoin casino anyway.
The lighting network is congested on Muun wallet too lol 😂 these memes ruined are daily spending for now
Just wait, fees will go down, low time preference.
What a wonderful explanation for the recent spamming attack on #Bitcoin. Thank you as always !!! 🎯💯
Matthew I want thank you for all your insights and support to all Bitcoiners.
This is one of the few questions I have for bitcoin aswell... this one is quite intimidating
I was hoping you would make a vid on this. Thanks.
Imagine the fees in this situation if btc is at $500k
They wouldn’t be able to afford it and everything will go back to normal 😂
Thank you Matthew keep up the good fight, people who use other people's jokes aren't comedians
I think it may be time to fork the ordinals off the original BTC chain, if that is possible. BTC is money, not for spam and garbage.
Ordinals is an external numbering system that is fake, but cannot be solved with a fork. There are other solutions like choosing to mine with a mining pool that won't include spam in the blocks that they produce. Like Ocean.xyz
JFC, fork the code, remove anything you don't like and add anything you like and fork it.
It is open source, you know. You don't need permission. While doing that please, bring back CPU mining, I really liket those times....
Let me know when you are finished.
@@Bitcoin_University Datacarriersize=0 on Knots OR bitcoin core will prevent the transactions from getting into your node's mempool.
@@Bitcoin_University I send my hash to ocean but part of being permissionless unstopable money is that is permissionless and unstopable. Suggest you just get over it and move on.
i'm into bitcoin since about 4 years, and this is the first time i am scared. if transaction fees keep rising we have a big problem
block spamming has happened before just after the halving, its happened before and it will happen again. No ned to be scared
Thank you Matthew for all the Bitcoin Alpha you have been giving us Bitcoiners. You keep us all sane during the volatility.
I gotta say, I normally agree with almost everything you say, but this isn’t spam. It’s an open, permission-less protocol and people are PAYING the fees. It’s much different than email because email is free. If someone is willing to pay the fee and strengthen the network, then so be it.
If Bitcoin’s monetary use doesn’t eventually price these guys out, then the free market is essentially saying Bitcoins monetary use isn’t really as valuable as we think.
The Bitcoin network is a pure free market and I believe the free market will eventually price this stuff out.
When nation states and central banks are settling on the base-layer, a lot of this stuff just won’t make nearly as much sense.
We are very, very early.
Thanks for everyone you do Matthew! Keep up the great work!
The ROI on making scams is higher than the amount people are willing to pay to transmit value, which means there will be no monetary transactions on chain if this effect lasts long enough. This bubble will pop but the idea that any collectable fad locks up the blockchain making it useless to transact on is a serious threat. I'm not here to make miners rich, I'm here for a monetary revolution.
@@HelloWorld29960 as am I my friend, but if Bitcoin can’t survive this it’s completely useless.
How do you figure email is free? Lol
@@parker5548 it’s essentially free. I can hop onto my email and manually send out thousands of emails at no cost.
I’m confused, do you pay to send an email?
Now, yes, if you want to send out millions at a time, there’s a small cost, but I believe it to be pretty insignificant.
@@HelloWorld29960 I am here for that as well my friend, but last I checked we don’t own the chain.
If Bitcoin can’t survive this, then it’s structurally a very fragile system.
Great video as always 🙏🏻 thanks
Biggest mistake in BTC History was everyone accepting Ordinals and Inscriptions
Everyone did? I don't remember doing so.
@Psybx >Unintended consequences
big blockers already warned about this consequence of segwit before it was forked in
@@Andrew-ho4vq you can reject them if you wish - there's even a script to do it... let me know how that works out
@@fo747nah bigger block sizes is a problem not a solution.
@@fo747 no room for big block heads on this channel 🤡
Thank you for talking about this. this is important
Explain something to me: if somebody is doing a daily DCA of $50, is all their bitcoin worthless now, due to "stranded UTXOs?" Call me crazy, but it sounds like spam attacks like this are a good way to drive people into ETFs...
I don't like these spammers either and I hope they run out of money sooner rather than later. We can't stop them directly but we can call attention to the BS.
On the upside though, at least the Bitcoin they must buy to do this will flow from weak hands to strong hands.
@Bitcoin_University can you do a video on bitcoin attack vectors like this and second order potential outcomes if they succeeded in making the blockchain unusable?
Love this channel!!!
Im SO happy i finished moving my bitcoin yesterday. Holy.... i hope that the fees go back down. For everyone else. But the day is coming where cold storage doesnt make sense for average people because the fee is higher than their bank account. Get in now while you can.
Hi Matt, are our sats in any danger if this spammers get bigger?
Allowing these transactions is a bug in btc core. Btc knots already adressed this bug. Luckely knots is available on umbrel store, but not 100% integrated yet. If core doesn't adress this bug, then you can at least easely switch to knots.
This is my greatest concern, there always people who can ruin something good. No way people on tight budgets will be able to pay huge fees like we see on Etherium.
Bitcoin is meant to scale in layers. People will need to move to Lightning and other 2nd layers over time. This was inevitable. The problem is that unethical crypto VCs are accelerating the time line
@@Bitcoin_University can we remove the tap root update? This last update caused all of this right?
*Ethereum
@@TheZoekie No because btc is decentralised, so just as much there is a "we" that dislikes it, there is also a "we" who does like it (miners for instance, RUNE, ordinals, brc20 enjoyers, myself) :).
@@TheZoekie No. Taproot caused none of this. The 'spam' could have occurred years ago. It uses OP_RETURN which came into existence... in 2014. It's literally using bitcoin from 2014. There is nothing new about this 'attack' or exploit it was going to happen eventually.
All will be good
if you dont like it... put in a BIP and revert the Taproot changes that enabled them
I think Taproot was a good upgrade. Shitcoiners try to ruin everything
The community is large and well informed. Something positive will emerge out of this. BTC is anti fragile.
Do I understand... The spamming making spammers poorer? And miners richer.
Eventually spammers will have emptied their pockets and they disappear into insignificance.
Fees get back to normal.
Spammers get rekt.
Is that a fair/correct summary/evaluation?
@@witness1000exactly this. If it's spam, everyone will quickly learn that there's no free lunch. That it actually costs to spam. And when spammers go bust, it's business as usual.
@@witness1000 because the government will never run out of money
I wonder if UTXO management could be done on a 2nd layer protocol then recorded as 1 transaction on the Bitcoin layer.
Also instead of small amounts being "lost" couldn't they become transactional possibly through Liquid network system. Maybe a good project for MSTR to create a 2nd layer solution. 😊
Could you make a video outlining how to protect against a "low entropy" wallet attack - like what was seen with the coldcard just a few months ago?
Thank you Matt
Hmm what about some fix that rejects transactions which fees are higher than the amount you are sending? Is this possible or are there holes in this?
Good nuance and careful take. A lot better than your recent tweets on the topic.
Despite the risk of giving them publicity that they can use, I'm glad that you have the courage to say it out loud and by choosing excellent examples to show that it is nothing but SPAM!
Yes, that's always the trade-off
Excellent analysis
Thank you
How do you see the prognosis for this ? Could the miners block the spam transactions somehow ? It would seem dubious though for miners to be blocking transactions.
“Software update?” Hi, Matt would a consensus for a hard fork or soft fork among the miners or the node operators resolve the issue?
Fees were ver expensive around christmas and tgen came down to $1 before the halvening.
It will cone down again unless someone is sustainably making a lot of money on each transaction, which means the network is very valuable and btc price will rise accordingly.
I'll just hold. I have a small amount of btc on strike so can use lightning if necessary.
It seems like a fork without the ability to spam could be a solution, but wouldn't miners continue to operate on the more profitable spam network, keeping that as the most secure chain? Trying to see a way out of this
Thx Matthew
What do you have to say about the $250 fee to move any bitcoin.
Thanks Matthew. This got my blood boiling. From my understanding nodes can be directed to their choice of meme pool. If a group of miners decided not to take the bribes (that's what these seem to be) could they point to those who won't. Just grasping.
Here's a thought...Fees are high and likely going higher on a fiat standard as fiat has no bottom. What about when majority of transactions flip to a BTC standard? I'm thinking even a fool will be less likely to part with his scarce asset when it comes to spamming the network. Just a thought...
Cant pay fees with dollars. Have to pay on chain fees with bitcoin. bitcoin is the standard. They will go broke. It will take time. Be patient.
Matt, is this why my 2 S9s were suddenly profitable? I was so confused 😂 I had no idea what was happening. My daily reward skyrocketed for no reason. Pool hash or workers didn’t drop and I was so ready for the reward to halve, then boom! 25% more daily rewards! 😂
I’m confused Matthew. All these ship coins and ordinals on bitcoin network: will they be destroyed as a new UTXO is created in a transaction ?wouldn’t the bitcoin image associated with the one Sat be destroyed if that person tried to transfer it to some new address?
I’d say its a mix of spam, a bit of hashrate decreasing, and a knock on effect of people overpaying to get a tx in halving block and subsequent txs with wallet fees auto setting.
Hashrate hasn't decreased. It's just spam. It's all spam. 😅 Take a look at the blocks on mempool and filter by op_return
"As of block 840081, since the halving, there have been 420,570 non-coinbase txs. Of these, 360,065 (85.6%) are runes only, 1,832 (0.44%) are inscription reveals only, 1,625 (0.39%) are both, and 57,048 (13.6%) are neither."
From @achow101
Nation states would not have infinite money, as the BTC supply would dry up. And to keep up with price they would have to destroy their currency within some time trying to keep up with purchase of BTC. They could go on for a while, but not for long.
Just my opinion. Great video as always 👍
My thinking is that when the Difficulty Adjustment (DA) takes place in 4 days the high fees would cause the DA to reduce the nonce zero number size sufficiently bringing down the fee costs accordingly. This would then make it cost prohibitive for mining pools and miners to use their own wallets to bounce fake txns around between themselves as more miners will be able to capture those transactions and take the monetary value away from the colluding miners. I believe that this "fee attack" will be rectified in 4 days.
Hi Matthew. Someone was arguing with me that small UTXOs are not an issue because there are ways to consolidate without incurring large fees. In your estimation is this true and I’d love to hear you expand upon methods for UTXO consolidation. Thanks for all the great content
He has videos on it
An interesting result of high fees is that the price is essentially fixed as very few people will be making real transactions. So once fees cone down there may be a dramatic proce correction in one direction or the other.
I would not support filtering transactions. But I don't precisely buy to make transactions with it, at least, not in the upcoming decade. Traders may have a different feeling
Very insightful. The miners are the custodians of the network so is it true that any change in the protocol to ban ordinals will require their collective permission, despite it being very lucrative?
Can you do a video on the "Bitcoin 2106 Bug" ? It's not often addressed and I would love to hear your take on it.
Saylor was right... Those who want to change the protocol have no BTC. All Shipcoiners and wannabe VCs, Revert back before shipcoiners ruin the best money ever. Tell those guys to stick to ETH
This is exciting. Thanks for covering this. I have no idea what is going on. Crazy fees!!!!!!
This is a tricky one. No one wants high fees. But high fees are to come if world adoption is in its future. I can’t help but feel like the bitcoin network is going to restandardize the world and that will have overall extremely positive outcomes. But transacting on the base layer will not be for everyone unfortunately. I think that’s the reality whether a single SOB was minted or not.
The more I listen, the more a Maxi I’m becoming!
In the case of a nation-state spam attack, how would the protocol change happen? I wonder if it would be similar to how the blocksize war went down.
A nation state can never spam the blockchain like this indefinitly. They would have to keep buying bitcoin in order to do this, printing up money, devaluing their own currency; and eventually nobody will trade them bitcoin for their shitcoin; and then the spamming will stop.
I noticed that every week of the having is always been a green bar on the weekly chart so I called the price by midnight Sunday and was right and impressed my dad. Anyway do you think we're going to follow history and have a post halving dip before taking off?
Or do you think that we put in an all-time high before the halving so maybe we also put the dip in before the halving? I mean I'm long-term so it doesn't really matter to me but I like to speculate for fun.
This is essentialy tokenization on bitcoin.. runes will move to L2s like lightning or something else down the road most likely.
The cost of sending an email or make a phone call doesn't scale, it remains relatively the same. It's a free market. High fees will be the future at some point and will price out useless applications anyways.
I do not think these fees will be high for long.
Tnx
Great thing about free markets is that supply and demand will always meet where actual individual people find value. I see a potential upside in this that it will incentivize more miners and ultimately make BTC even more robust in the long run.
During the definitive bull run the fees will be completely out of sense like never seen before.
Uxto management is an important topic.
Users will have to handle their stack as a bag full of gold to not miss much of the nuggets during transportation.
Matthew, in addition to transaction cost, the number of transactions in each block has doubled. And why were miners not utilizing all that capacity previously?
Thank you.
Blocks have a data limit, not a transaction limit. So you can have one giant transaction that takes up lots of data, or lots of tiny transactions instead.
I understand that. But overnight we seem to have gone from almost clocks having 2.5k - 3.5k transactions to now most blocks having >5k tx per block for most of the day since the halving.
Well, I understand the problem, but is there a solution?
500k for a transaction? Can you explain please? I mean let's say my BTC worth was a million is USD, are we saying that if I sent the BTC from location A to location B, it would essentially be halved ?
Hedge with mining stocks?
Ty MC
Bitcoin L1 can't be scaled up to handle 8 billion transactions daily. What L2 solutions do you recommend?
imagine people not screwing things up
When scamming becomes an attack factor, we have to consider ways of defending the network!
The only way to stop spam attacks is to stop selling Bitcoin for Fiat. Only when you trade Bitcoin for real productive value is the cost too great to spam the network.
Could you please make a video on how to avoid propagating ordinals for those of us that run nodes? I've heard Bitcoin Core v27 was suppose to address this but can't find information to confirm.
Thanks
By the way, it is not censorship if the attackers are exploiting a vulnerability that has been in Bitcoin Core since 2013 and needs to be fixed asap.
To be fair, runes is a protocol not funded by VCs. Runes and ordinals help to make layer 2 like lightning even remotely relevant.
lol I was living off btc but the fees are crazy right now so I went back to cash still holding my btc but dang this is wild it’s my first halving
It's important to have some BTC on Lightning for day to day spending
I’m uneducated in lighting like can I send btc from my cold wallet even if my cold wallet doesn’t a lightning network to my Muun just on the lightning network instead?
Imagine being in a poor country and dealing with this nonsense not been able to use the main chain
Hi, I've noticed that transaction fees on the Bitcoin network have been extremely high lately. Do you think this could be due to increased demand, or is there something else going on, like those spam attacks we've been hearing about?
I consolidated mining payments ~50 utxos of .0005 each last year for a total of $20 and that took a whole weekend. THAT was ridiculous. The situation now is INSANE. I could be holding a whole Bitcoin now which is worthless if I didn't consolidate. Thankfully Litecoin still works when I need it.
Unfortunately, this is one advantage of holding an ETF on an exchange. This is the first legitimate threat I have seen over the years, but I am confident that it will be solved by further layer technologies.
What if every bitcoiner starts mining? Would that bring fees down?
Post halving info. TY
Would not government money printers have to be backed by taxes at some point?
The US has the clear advantage in this. I.e. a state like Egypt or Venzuela, it seems like printing money to spam the BTC network creates more problems than it solves.
Even in the US, at some point, voters would be concerned that money was being spent to address the "dollar threat" of BTC by debasing all dollar based investors and subsequently benefitting BTC miners.