Who is conducting a new round of Bitcoin "stress testing"?

When the sun rose this morning, you saw another completely batshit day in the Bitcoin world. A European Bitcoin exchange just gave away 200 BTC private keys, and users scrambled to collect them, and then these users, effectively DDoSed the entire Bitcoin network...

CoinWallet.eu posted on the Bitcointalk forum yesterday that it had given up on implementing a new "stress test". In addition, they will give the Bitcoin community 200 BTC by publishing thousands of private keys on the forum, saying that anyone can take it for free.

Subsequently, Babbitt forum user '鼻唾' posted a message to expose the news - Beware of CoinWallet's conspiracy to give away coins, and the stress test plan has been upgraded.

Babbitt forum user chehw_1 gave his explanation:

"This behavior is despicable, equivalent to killing someone with a borrowed knife and launching a DDOS attack.

If the BTC owned by each private key is actually composed of thousands (or tens of thousands) of UTXOs, then transferring all the BTC under such a private key may require at least several hundred KB or even more than 1M bytes.

In other words, if there are 1,000 such transactions, the amount of data may increase by 1G. According to the existing block limit (1M), the Bitcoin system will need more than 8 days to process them.

If n people compete for a private key at the same time, the amount of data required for the transaction will be magnified n times. If the mempool of the node (or mining pool) cannot support such a large amount of data, it may crash.

In addition, when scrambling for private keys, countless double-spending transactions are bound to occur. In order to prevent losses from double-spending transactions, exchanges (or merchants) may need to wait for several more confirmations before they dare to approve them, which will affect the time it takes for normal transactions to take effect.
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CoinWallet shamelessly calls it a gift to the community, but its real intention is to DDoS the Bitcoin network without them even having to lift a finger. At the time of writing, everything seems to be going according to their plan.

As people scramble for these coins, tons of transactions will be generated, and once everyone is trying to get the BTC in the same private key, the process will continue to amplify.

The current backlog of unconfirmed transactions has reached about 90,000 , and the memory pool has reached a maximum of 150MB , while the normal level is below 10. On the Bitcointalk forum, many users who tried to collect these coins reported that their Bitcoin clients crashed.

CoinWallet.eu kicked off the "gift attack" in an attempt to prevent normal transactions from being processed and clog the memory pool. If the memory pool becomes too large, the computer running the Bitcoin node may crash and shut down. (Because the memory pool is stored locally, the problem becomes the physical computer memory running the node itself)

In previous “attack tests,” CoinWallet.eu did all the heavy lifting itself, with its most successful destructive experiment causing the Bitcoin memory pool to reach 300MB. This time, the direct attackers were Bitcoin users, and CoinWallet.eu COO James Wilson told the author in an email that they hope to exceed 1GB this time.

Their ultimate goal is to prove a point: Bitcoin needs to be upgraded so that it can handle a wider range of transactions. This time, CoinWallet.eu hoped that greedy people would help them implement this attack plan. They did it, well done, everyone!

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