Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] New attack identified and potential solution described: Dropped-transaction spam attack against the block size limit

From: "Raystonn ." <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2015 12:03:13 -0700

You are right of course.  This will work.  I like this idea more than my own proposed fix, as it doesn’t make any big changes to the economics of the system in the way that burning would have.

From: Gavin Andresen 
Sent: Tuesday, June 09, 2015 11:25 AM
To: Raystonn . 
Cc: Loi Luu ; Bitcoin Dev 
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] New attack identified and potential solution described: Dropped-transaction spam attack against the block size limit

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 1:52 PM, Raystonn . <[email-masked]> wrote:

  That does sound good on the surface, but how do we enforce #1 and #2?  They seem to be unenforceable, as a miner can adjust the size of the memory pool in his local source.

It doesn't have to be enforced. As long as a reasonable percentage of hash rate is following that policy an attacker that tries to flood the network will fail to prevent normal transaction traffic from going through and will just end up transferring some wealth to the miners.

Although the existing default mining policy (which it seems about 70% of hashpower follows) of setting aside some space for high-priority transactions regardless of fee might also be enough to cause this attack to fail in practice.

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Gavin Andresen