RC Attack Mode: Activated!
Last Thursday was my last big Steem powerdown. Now I only have the 1750 (and counting) coins left that I earned while I was powering down. I was debating if I would keep or dump these coins (and I'm still not sure) but considering everything that has gone down with HF24 it certainly pushes me in one direction over another (can you guess which?).
I feel like I finally have enough Bitcoin so I've started to load back up on Ethereum.
Turns out I was able to use my MetaMask BIPS seed on my new Trezor and get access to the coins that way as well. How convenient. Of course if the coins get stolen I won't know if I should blame Metamask or Trezor, lol.
In any case,
Now that I am no longer worried about my funds being frozen, I've turned my sights to potentially attacking the Steem network. I was randomly taking a look at this post the other day:
Yep!
I filled up an entire block with garbage just to see if I could. It costs quite a bit of Resource Credits to do it, but there are still a lot of whales on Steem who never started a powerdown. Honestly, I'm a bit surprised that the accounts that had their accounts frozen by the soft fork didn't start filling up all the blocks themselves. They still had access to post custom JSON which is what you want because it costs the least RCs for the most bandwidth.
Would it be stupid to attack Steem?
I'm guessing it would be. When we forked to Hive we showed those noobs how to freeze accounts and eventually funnel stake into other accounts. If we attack them with our RCs they are going to do the same back to us. What will be the result?
We'd see how broken the RC system is!
I've talked about this quite a few times, but the way we set up the RC system will eventually come back to haunt us.
Essentially, in order for users with less stake to even use the blockchain, we had to reduce the cost of transactions by a huge margin (at least a factor of 10 RC). When blocks start filling up we'll have to raise RC costs and this will prevent a lot of accounts from posting transactions. At this point we will enable RC pools to try and correct the problem.
https://www.coindesk.com/free-transactions-invite-systemic-attacks-on-blockchains-researchers-find
I randomly read this post the other day and it really struck a chord. This is very accurate, blockchains that offer free transactions will get attacked at one point or another.
Resource Credits won't be free forever.
It probably sounds silly now, but once our blocks start filling up and there is actually competition to post information on our blockchain, shit is going to get real. The costs of RCs will go up. Witnesses will implement RC pools to "fix" the problem, but that will actually make it worse.
How could it get worse with RC pools?
Once RC are in place and it is established that RCs are actually worth money, all of those RCs that the whales currently just let go to waste will be monetized. Today, all the whales are just letting their RCs sit at 100% or they are claiming account tokens without putting any stress on the network.
Once blocks fill up and RC pools are implemented, whales will suddenly find that their gigantic RC pools are worth something. They will start selling bandwidth on the blockchain, and this will even further raise RC costs for every operation and raise the bar for others. This is a serious problem that no one considers because it is such a non-issue at the moment.
Bandwidth attack
If Steem and Hive start attacking each other it's going to become a prominent issue quite quickly. Blocks have a maximum size of 65k. If we were filling them up to the max we'd be adding over a gigabyte of data to the blockchain every day. Somehow I doubt that our servers would be able to handle this extra load, and even if they could, it would obviously be more expensive.
What kind of idiot attacks their own investment?
That's somewhat the point of cryptocurrency, amirite? The idea is that the network gives incentive to build value rather than attack it, and get rewarded accordingly. It's hard to justify an attack on either side, no matter how much we're seeking revenge. Something to think about.
Still, even if there is no attack, the blockchain will eventually get bogged down by legitimate transactions. This is going to become a prominent issue, one way or another. We simply aren't considering it because the competition to post information to this immutable database is non-existent at the moment.
