Bitcoin Under Attack

The recent turmoil in Greece, which has included the government institution of withdrawal limits at major banks, should have presented a major opportunity for Bitcoin to gain positive media attention. With Greek citizens flocking to buy bitcoin during bank closures, the virtual currency should be enjoying media exposure as a stable, safe alternative currency for the Greek people.

Rough weekend
Instead, this week has been disastrous for Bitcoin. This past weekend, untimely software updates at Bitcoin delayed payment confirmations by up to five hours. However, at least those issues were not malicious.

Under attack
For the past couple of days, Bitcoin has been under attack by… someone. According to The Merkle, the Denial of Service (DoS) Attack this week on the cryptocurrency has been bogging down the Bitcoin blockchain, the public record of bitcoin transactions.

How it works
The responsible party is performing dozens of transactions per minute involving miniscule amounts of bitcoin (0.00001 BTC). Because of the tiny amount of the currency that is involved in each transaction, the spamming efforts are costing the perpetrator only about 8 cents per pop, but the constant barrage of orders has single-handedly filled up each 1 MB block that enters the blockchain.

Who is responsible?
When the largest Bitcoin transaction ever made was processed on Tuesday, onlookers initially suspected the Chinese bitcoin mining group F2Pool of orchestrating the attack. However, according to Motherboard, F2Pool was simply trying to clear out the spam by mining the huge, 999KB block.

What now?
Unfortunately, in the digital world of cryptography, it can be nearly impossible to determine the identity of the attackers in a scenario such as this one. For now Bitcoin must simply try to figure out the best way to stop the attack and/or roll with the punches.