"We are 100 percent sure that we can split the Bitcoin Cash Network into many different forks."
On the 1st of September, the Bitcoin Cash Stress Test Day will take place: The BCH community is trying to build 32-megabyte blocks for a whole day. Meanwhile, a mysterious miner announces that it will collapse Bitcoin Cash through a series of attacks that day, choosing a previously poorly-discussed target: the LevelDB database and memory footprint.
Bitcoin Cash prides itself on being the bitcoin with more capacity. In itself, that's not wrong, because in the 32 megabyte blocks of Bitcoin Cash per se fit around 100 transactions per second. The irony of the story is that Bitcoin Cash barely makes more than 0.1 transactions per second. Despite Yours, despite MemoCash, despite everything. Websites like txhighway.com or bitcoinsubway.cash will continue to show a ghost town soon after a year after the Fork.
Bitcoin Cash is like a Ferrari that does not come out of the game, where you can only drive at walking pace. The Bitcoin Cash Community is hosting the Bitcoin Cash Stress Test Day on September 1 to prove that the engine really delivers what it promises, and not, as critics say, get smacked off once you hit the road.
"The Bitcoin Cash Stresst Test," explains the website, "is a community-run stress test of the Bitcoin Cash Network and related services. Our goal is to generate millions of transactions with minimal fees over the course of 24 hours. "This volume is intended to persuade traders and entrepreneurs worldwide" that the BCH network is able to scale up and scale up onchain today process. "The stress test will collect data that will be extremely useful to developers and businesses.
32 strips but no cart: The Transaction Highway on Bitcoin Cash.
Anyone interested in Bitcoin Cash can join. You can tap and pay on yours.org without any end, mix your Coins with CoinShuffle if it works, send MemoCash one memo after the other, like and answer, on Satoshi Dice and Blockchain.Poker play without end, a hash from every file and email you've ever received, store on the Blockchain, enter one bet after another with ChainBet, and so on. And if that's not enough to get the 32-megabyte blocks full, which is pretty likely, you can still use the scripts the stress test organizers want to deploy: "Scripts are still being developed and tested and will be available a few weeks before the stress test, so people can test it in advance. The links are posted here, "promises the website.
Will this be okay? If you believe the group called "BitPico", it will become a disaster.
Attack preparations have already begun
BitPico is, as you can safely say, a social media account on Slack, Twitter and so on. By its own account, BitPico is a collective of Bitcoin developers, miners and whales who recently connected 1,300 Halong Dragonmint miners to the network, accumulating a cumulative hashrate of more than 40,000 terahash per second over the next six months to mobilize a total of 500,000 terahash of nuclear energy with a hydro-backup.
Overall, BitPico, whether on Twitter or Slack, is pretty big-mouthed, and you never really know what's behind it. For example, at the time, the group announced it would be able to mine Segway2x despite the cancellation of Hardfork, and was recently struck by a brief but fruitless DoS attack on the Lightning network. Now BitPico is sounding to switch to Bitcoin Cash, the attacking equipment they used for the Lightning stress tests. "Why? It's time to show how centralized bcash really is, and we're 100 percent sure that we can split the network into many different forks. We look forward to a 51 percent attack on Bitcoin Cash in September. "
Allegedly, as BitPico on Twitter, the preparation of the attack has already begun by the group slowly ramping up attack nodes to initiate a Sybill attack with a total of 5000 nodes. For some in the Bitcoin (BTC) scene, this is reason enough to suddenly like BitPico and "pray it's true."
In an interview with Coindesk that has not yet been released, but from which BitPico has "leaked" the answers about Pastebin just in case Coindesk refuses to publish the interview, the group explains more exactly what they are planning , The whole thing, whether joking or serious, is too interesting not to summarize here.
Nodes fall out, freeze, fumble away
When asked why they are attacking Bitcoin Cash, BitPico states that it is a "stress test" to "validate the integrity of the Bitcoin Cash Network for the benefit of its investors [...] The first rule of all decentralized computer networks is that Things go bad if they are not attacked enough to identify and resolve all issues. "Attacks are planned to" everything from low-level TCP / IP stack attacks "to" high-level Bitcoin cash protocol attacks. "This combination is guaranteed that there are two problems: "1. the weakest nodes on VPS will crash or consume their bandwidth sprawl and will not answer anymore ". This is not surprising in a 32 MB stress test.
A surprise, however, is the next problem listed by BitPico: "2. all other nodes will fail because there are a number of consecutive pre-fused 32 megabyte blocks. Our LevelDB stress tests show that the Bitcoin Cash UTXO database needs up to 200 gigabytes of memory to fully process a complex 32 megabyte block. If this memory is unavailable, the UTXO database will be corrupted, and if LevelDB does not free up memory, the operating system will freeze. Our LevelDB stress tests have been active for more than 7 months since we moved the UTXO set of our Bitcoin implementation into a separate database. LevelDB was not designed to deal with reading, writing, and deleting such complex big data in parallel. "
BitPico is confident to force the Bitcoin Cash Blockchain because there are only a handful of pools and not enough full nodes to enforce the network rules. "If we isolate the majority of these nodes, we can use our own nodes to hold back blocks or headers, reject blocks or headers, deliberately fail, forward blocks or headers, and so forth." The attackers benefit most recently from 32 megabytes of increased blocksize limit: "Through a combination of sybil attacks and 32 megabyte blocks that we produce through our farm, we can inject blocks to increase latency so that miners loose consensus and begin to each of them has its own chains, because we have all the different nodes in our nodes, which means that we can not do any more. "When the time comes, you can safely and effortlessly do double-donate from unconfirmed transactions.
BitPico does not seem to have genuinely bad intentions. She ends the interview by saying that "only time can tell if Bitcoin Cash can withstand this attack." Others in the Bitcoin (BTC) scene "Roger verse's fraudulent hopes and dreams are faded into oblivion."
Bitcoin Cash and Roger Ver, we come back to BitPico's attack. It sounds interesting in any case. But does it make sense?
Interesting, but also doubtful
I've contacted some Bitcoin Cash developers. That weak nodes, whose bandwidth is not sufficient to spread a series of 32 megabytes blocks, fall from the grid, should not be further surprising and also a limited damage. If you allow 32 megabyte blocks, you also need nodes that handle it. But it will be interesting to see how many nodes are actually there.
The fact that it comes to Forks, most developers doubt, since the Bitcoin cash miners and also the stock exchanges and traders form a dense network, which can be isolated by many false Nodes hardly or not at all. If the node of a stock exchange or a block explorer is connected to the big miners - one may assume that they are - and share the same consensus rules with them, then attempts to separate them by fake nodes will probably be ineffective. But, as it turns out, when there are targeted, long-prepared attacks by miners and nodes in a stress test scenario, it may well be another question.
After all, what about LevelDB corruption? This scenario is certainly the most interesting and difficult to classify. Some developers have suggested that it does not sound implausible to increase the memory requirements of LevelDB to 200 gigabytes, but one needs to explore this more closely. Normal blocks should not be a problem, explains a developer of Bitcoin Unlimited. The Gigablock-Testnet tested blocks up to a size of 500 megabytes and found no problems with LevelDB. But it would be conceivable that a specially built block leads to such problems.
Another developer also doubts this. The LevelDB cache is set in the config file, so LevelDB can not use more memory than is allocated to the Bitcoin cash node itself. There would be some spikes in the memory footprint of an outdated implementation when the contents of the database are written to disk, but that has long been resolved. In addition, there are very huge applications that use LevelDB, much larger than Bitcoin, and there would be no problems there.
The argument or BitPicos attack plan all together suspect. For example, some claims - such as the ongoing pre-produced 32 megabyte blocks - imply a 51 percent attack that BitPico is more likely to be unable to handle. But again, this is hard to say, since Bitcoin Cash usually accounts for only a small fraction of the total SHA256-produced ashram hashrates. If 10 to 20 percent of Bitcoin hashrates open to attack Bitcoin Cash, they should have enough power.
The bitcoin cash developers agree that continuous 32 megabyte blocks in any case still need an improvement of the software. The prospect that such a block drives the memory requirements of LevelDB to 200 gigabytes, some find even more exciting. Will Parallel Validation by Bitcoin Unlimited ensure that another is paralleled with this block? Will the network find a spontaneous consensus on which blocks are allowed? What will happen?
All of these are reasons why you can look forward to the stress test with much interest, but also a bit of anxiety.
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