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In computing, a denial-of-service assault (DoS assault; UK: /dɒs/ doss US: /dɑːs/ daas[1]) is a cyber offense where the offender aims to render a machine or network resource inaccessible to its designated users by temporarily or permanently disrupting services of a host linked to a network. -The Wikipedia definition of denial-of-service attack.
This is a very fundamental idea. An individual utilizes their own resources to disturb the operations of other machines on a network.
DoS assaults have been a concern for as long as the internet has been operational. One of the frequently debated “earliest Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) assaults” was against the Internet Service Provider (ISP) Panix during the mid-90s. Naturally, there were many prior technical instances on earlier internet services, but this was one of, if not the, first significant demonstrations of such an attack on the contemporary World Wide Web.
This assault initiated numerous computers to start a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection with the ISP’s servers but never completing the handshake protocol that finalized the connection. This exhausts the server’s resources for managing network connections and hinders legitimate users from connecting to the internet via the ISP’s servers.
Since this “initial” DDoS assault, they have become as prevalent on the internet as storms are in nature, a routine event that extensive parts of internet infrastructure have been constructed to defend against.
The Blockchain
The blockchain serves as one of the fundamental elements of Bitcoin, and a necessary dependency for Bitcoin’s operations as a distributed ledger. I am confident that many individuals within this domain would label so-called “spam” transactions a DoS assault on the Bitcoin blockchain. To label it thus, one would need to define the “service” the blockchain provides as a system and clarify how spam transactions deny that service to others in a manner not intended by the system’s design.
I’d hazard a guess that most individuals who view spam as a DoS assault would express something along the lines of “the service the blockchain provides is processing financial transactions, and spam occupies space from individuals attempting to do that.” The issue is, that is not precisely the service the blockchain provides.
The service it genuinely offers is the validation of any consensus-valid transaction through a real-time auction that settles periodically whenever a miner discovers a block. If your transaction is consensus-valid, and you have submitted a sufficiently high fee for a miner to incorporate your transaction in a block, you are utilizing the service the blockchain delivers precisely as intended.
This was a deliberate design choice made over years during the “Block Size Wars” and concluded with the activation of Segregated Witness and the dismissal of the Segwit2x block size increase via a hard fork advocated by major companies at the time. The blockchain operates by prioritizing the highest bidding fee transactions, and users are at liberty to compete in that auction. This is how block space is allocated, with a global limit to safeguard verifiability and a free-market pricing mechanism.
Nothing about a transaction some arbitrarily label as “spam” succeeding in this open auction constitutes a DoS of the blockchain. It is a user utilizing that resource in the manner it is intended, engaging in the auction with all others.
The Relay Network
Many, if not the majority, of Bitcoin nodes provide transaction relay as a service to the remainder of the network. If you communicate your transactions to your peers on the network, they will relay them to their peers, and so forth. Due to the peering logic that determines which nodes to connect with, maintaining broad connectivity, this service enables transactions to disseminate across the network rapidly, especially allowing them to reach all mining nodes.
Another service is block relay, spreading valid blocks as they are discovered in a similar manner. This has been finely tuned over the years, to the point where most of the time an entire block is never actually relayed, merely a concise “outline” of the block header and the transactions included, allowing you to reconstruct them from your own mempool. In simpler terms, enhancements in block relay are reliant on transaction relay functioning appropriately and disseminating all valid and likely to be mined transactions.
When nodes lack transactions in a block already in their mempool, they must request them from neighboring nodes, prolonging the time to validate the block in the process. They also explicitly forward those transactions along with the block outline to other peers in case they are lacking, leading to bandwidth wastage. The more nodes filtering transactions they classify as spam, the longer it takes blocks featuring those filtered transactions to propagate across the network.
Transaction filtering actively seeks to disrupt both of these services, where in the case of transaction relay it poorly prevents them from disseminating to miners, and during block propagation it experiences slight but noticeable performance degradation the more nodes on the network filter transactions.
These node policies have the overt purpose of degrading the network service of propagating transactions to miners and the rest of the network, perceiving the degradation of block propagation as a penalty towards miners who opt to include valid transactions they are filtering. They aim to induce a service degradation as a goal and regard the degradation of another service resulting from that effort as beneficial.
This indeed constitutes a DoS assault, as it genuinely degrades a network service contrary to the system’s design.
Where From Here?
The entire narrative of Knotz vs. Core, or “Spammers” vs. “Filterers,” has been nothing more than a dismally ineffective and failed DoS assault on the Bitcoin network. Filters accomplish nothing to inhibit filtered transactions from being included in blocks. The objective of disrupting transaction propagation to miners has encountered no success whatsoever, and the degradation of block relay has been minimal enough to not dissuade miners.
I view this as a significant illustration of Bitcoin’s durability and resilience against attempted censorship and disruption on the level of the Bitcoin Network itself.
So what next?
A BIP proposed by an anonymous author has been introduced to enact a temporary softfork that would expire after roughly a year, creating numerous methods to render “spam” in Bitcoin transactions consensus invalid during that timeframe. After realizing the DoS assault on the peer-to-peer network has been a complete failure, filter advocates have shifted towards consensus modifications, as many of them were warned would be essential over two years ago.
Will this genuinely resolve the issue? No, it won’t. It will merely compel individuals who desire to submit “spam” to this forked network, assuming they follow through on its implementation, to utilize false ScriptPubKeys to encode their data in unspendable outputs that will inflate the UTXO set.
Thus, even if this fork garnered overwhelming support, was activated successfully, and did not result in a chainsplit, it would still not achieve the stipulated objective, leaving “spammers” with no alternative but to “spam” in the most harmful manner to the network possible.
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