Stress test is here again! Should we grab the Bitcoin with public private keys?

It is said that the legendary “stress test” is here again, and it’s still the same “CoinWallet.eu”, and it’s still so “annoying”!
But this time it seems to be a little different, and it has also caused more discussion in the Bitcoin community. What is going on?

The initial stress test took place a few months ago. At that time, CoinWallet itself was not well prepared. In its first attempt at an “attack”, its own bitcoind crashed, resulting in no stress at all. This was ridiculed by people in the community at the time as “those who want to stress test others cannot withstand the pressure themselves”, and became a laughing stock for a while.

The initial failure did not stop CoinWallet. A few days later, they launched the first effective stress test, allowing many people to experience "transaction queues" firsthand. Many people began to exclaim, "It turns out that Bitcoin can also be DDoSed!"

The way CoinWallet initiated压力测试was actually very simple, that is, by sending a large number of碎交易(amount of 0.x mBTC), paying standard or even higher fees, in order to quickly increase the number of Bitcoin transactions in the queue. They may construct transactions in various ways. For example, in addition to sending to their own addresses, they have also sent a large number of small transactions to brain wallet addresses and some well-known Bitcoin donation addresses, etc., but their goal is the same: to generate the largest number of Bitcoin transactions that occupy the largest space in the fastest time with the lowest cost possible.

After that, CoinWallet conducted several more stress tests. Generally speaking, each time it affected the experience of Bitcoin users to a certain extent, making everyone feel that transaction confirmations were slow, they had to wait in queues, and they were very unhappy.

In this case, many Bitcoin wallet developers (including our Bitcoin Wallet) have provided users with more fee options (such as higher or even user-defined fees), which allows users to choose high-fee mode to send transactions during stress testing and reduce waiting time.

There is always a devil who is always more capable than the good. Some time ago, CoinWallet even tried to conduct a small-scale stress test using a transaction fee of more than 0.7 mBTC. Of course, the amount of that test was very small and basically did not affect the user experience.

Up to this point, CoinWallet is still in the stage of self-testing, and Bitcoin users can only "criticize" during the stress test. As for the transaction queue, there is no way, either wait or pay more money, that's all they can do.

About a week ago, CoinWallet announced the date of the next stress test: 9月10日, and mentioned in the announcement that this stress test would be "the largest ever." Of course, this was another announcement that was meant to attract criticism.

Within two days of this announcement, CoinDesk published a report titled "Bitcoin Spam Tests 'Could Violate UK Law'", which caused an uproar in the community. It turned out that CoinWallet's "annoying" behavior violated British law!

CoinWallet and Mike Hearn even had a debate on Reddit about this:
CoinWallet: What? Is it illegal for a website on the Internet to send too many Bitcoin transactions? I paid for it!
Mike Hearn: Do you understand the law? The judge doesn't care whether you paid or not. The judge's logic is: ① Do you want to cause damage? ② Do you want to use technical means to achieve the above purpose? If the answer is "yes", then you are guilty and you are likely to be put in jail.
…

After the debate about "illegality", on September 10, the official stress test time announced by CoinWallet, CoinWallet announced that it had given up the stress test and would give 200 BTC to the Bitcoin community. The relevant private keys would be continuously published on the forum and anyone could take them away for free. When you try to "take away" these bitcoins, you will find that there are a large number of fragmented transactions on the relevant addresses. The way you transfer a fragmented transaction is essentially no different from the way CoinWallet transfers it itself. It is still a "stress test" and can still be understood as a "DDoS attack" on the Bitcoin network. Moreover, since many people have the same private key, they may all try to transfer coins. A large number of double-spending transactions will be broadcast on the Bitcoin network, which will undoubtedly greatly increase the load on the nodes. CoinWallet seems to have achieved its goal, and the effect of the stress test may even exceed their expectations.

So far, the number of unconfirmed transactions in the MemPool of Bitcoin nodes has exceeded 150,000, and the number of "double-spending transactions" broadcasted is really too much to count.

OK, now that we have a general idea of ​​what stress testing is all about and有哪些不同this time, how should we评价此类行为?
Here I will try to answer some common questions:
1. What is the purpose of CoinWallet?

have no idea!
CoinWallet itself will say that the purpose of stress testing is very lofty and for the future development of Bitcoin. Some people think that CoinWallet's stress test is actually to force everyone to accept a larger area (representing the XT side), some people think that CoinWallet represents the interests of certain mining pools (for higher handling fees), and some people think that CoinWallet is shorting to suppress the price of the currency. Is this really the case?
My answer is still: I don’t know!
It is difficult for us to speculate on other people's motives and judge their goodness and evil just by external observation. All we know is: CoinWallet spent hundreds of coins to do this, so it must be for something, right? That's all, nothing else.

2. Who is CoinWallet?

have no idea!

3. If, as Mike Hearn said, the British government will rule that CoinWallet is illegal, does that mean that the Bitcoin network will be protected by the government from "DDoS"?

If Bitcoin needed government protection from DDoS threats, it wouldn’t be Bitcoin.
Bitcoin itself is not afraid of "DDoS" stress testing by anyone, for any purpose, or using any method. If you are "annoyed" by the stress test, just pay a little more in handling fees.

4. Is stress testing a good thing or a bad thing?

Although the stress test has indeed affected the experience of many users, I personally do not think it is a bad thing. On the contrary, it will help Bitcoin users understand such a principle: blockchain is a scarce resource, and it costs money to occupy space on the blockchain. In other words, your Bitcoin transactions need to occupy other people's hard drives, memory, bandwidth, computing power and other resources. It is reasonable to pay some cost for these resources.
Moreover, even if CoinWallet does not conduct stress testing today, there will be CoinWallet1, CoinWallet2, etc. to conduct similar tests in the future. The purposes of these CoinWallets may be very "evil", but shouldn't Bitcoin be able to operate robustly no matter how evil they are?
On this point, I still say: "What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger."
So, if someone is willing to spend money to test it, then go ahead.

5. Should I try to grab the bitcoins in the private keys disclosed by CoinWallet?

Don't waste your energy, buddy. Others are using programs to compete with you, and you won't make much even if you do that (if you continue to spend on small transactions, most of it will go to pay for handling fees), and there are still many programs competing, which will generate a lot of double spending. You can't get any coins by manual labor.

In short, we don’t need to judge the good or evil of stress testers, nor do we need to worry about whether stress testing will harm Bitcoin. Bitcoin is still Bitcoin, whoever wants to stress test can do so!