So, I have a question related to Bitcoin and/or Monero.
What protects these chains from attacks like DDoSing?
I know the distributed nature and strong cryptography make it effectively impossible to actually crack the network but with AI bots dominating the web these days, what stops some force (namely state actors) from tying up the network by, say, sending and receiving sats en masse between a huge botnet?
Geeky, albeit genuine, question.
#BTC #XMR #blockchain #cybersec
Needing to pay a fee to have those transactions included in a block makes DDoS an ineffective long term strategy
Well, that certainly rules out script kiddies and other non-state level threats but what about those state level actors? If a government with a blank check decides it wants to attack the network, would the fee really be enough to stop it?
Governments can't have blank checks. They act like they do, but all they can do is print money really, and to attack they have to spend it all on BTC or XMR just to pay miners. The money devalues as they do it, and eventually to a point nobody wants to give them real BTC or XMR for their paper. They could confiscate people's stuff and sell it to other countries and keep it going a little longer, but that's destruction of their economy, ultimately they hurt themselves more than they hurt the network.
The fees.
So in Bitcoin, demand for block space is already high and the block space is limited, all a spammer can really do is drive up the cost of transactions, which they also have to pay to maintain the attack.
In Monero, there's the adaptive block size, which has a somewhat complex scheme but basically miners are incentivized to keep the block size down with a cost to raising it so they won't raise it until the value of the additional transactions outweighs the cost to raising it. So a spammer can try, but they'll only raise the cost of transactions for a time after which they'll not affect the throughput at all, they'll only raise the size of blocks. To continue this attack they have to keep fees high and increase the number of transactions they're doing, so they have to pay higher fees and more fees for more transactions.
In both cases these types of attack are very expensive.
Thanks for the in-depth answer. That's really good for stopping most attacks but what if a major government operating on a bank-sponsored blank check (which is pretty much any government running off of fractional reserve banking) wakes up someday and decides to set their sights on Bitcoin? If they have as much money as they need, couldn't they just say "screw the fees" and attack regardless?
Well, you can't pay fees in USD. They have to take their dollars and buy bitcoin with it to do this. And then they have to pay all the highest fees for all their transactions, higher than everybody else to ensure that no transactions get through. Anyone willing to pay more than them will force them to up what they're paying. Ultimately they'll spend everything they have on one block of transactions, have to buy more which means allowing someone to send them btc in a block, them do it again. They'd run out of money real quick.
In XMR, the block size would just keep getting bigger and they'd pay a huge premium to keep it happening. And again, they need XMR to pay fees, which means they need someone's transaction to get onto a block, and they can't spend that transaction for 10 blocks. The numbers on this are even worse than bitcoin because of the dynamic block size, they'd run through everything quickly, make the block space huge, then get a tx, wait ten blocks and start over again.
You can do either of these for a little while, but nobody has a blank check big enough to keep this up for very long. The fee market means that their cost goes up the longer they do it, and in XMR case, the block size too which means they have to increase the number of transactions they're putting out while simultaneously increasing the fee they're paying for each one.
This assumes that miners of course won't blacklist their addresses, they have an incentive not to, who doesn't want to take their money? But they also have an incentive to, the coins they're earning are worthless on a network that you can't use. Ultimately I think they would if it managed to go on long enough, and if that happened anything in those addresses is stuck there and they have to buy more and send it to a new address and start over. If they continued on indefinitely either way, soon all their capital will be in the hands of the miners and the currency they're buying coins with will hyperinflate to worthlessness. At that point nobody is taking their dollars or whatever they're printing for bitcoin or XMR and they wouldn't be able to continue.
This is of course in the scenario where they do it indefinitely, as you can see it's not viable even for governments.
Whoa okay, thanks again for this response! What you're basically saying is that the reason they don't go after Bitcoin/Monero that way is because they'd effectively only be feeding both economies while destroying their own fiat economy?
Geez, that's genius design haha
The game theory of it all is incredibly interesting and effective
Well, kind of. Such an attack would grind the network to a halt for a time. But in the end yes, the miners would own all the capital they spent on it and their currency would be much weaker, they'd hurt themselves much worse long term for a short term attack.
It's all incentives, game theory. The main reason they really don't have a blank check is because of the way their fiat money works, and not due to how XMR or BTC work. They don't have a blank check to do anything, they have to manage their resources.
But yeah, the fee market is designed to deter spam of any kind at any scale. Every now and then you get someone that wants to burn a bunch of money but for the most part these blockchains are spam free.
