Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Stressing Out: Bitcoin “Stress Testing”

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 9604))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

In this paper, we present an empirical study of a recent spam campaign (a “stress test”) that resulted in a DoS attack on Bitcoin. The goal of our investigation being to understand the methods spammers used and impact on Bitcoin users. To this end, we used a clustering based method to detect spam transactions. We then validate the clustering results and generate a conservative estimate that 385,256 (23.41 %) out of 1,645,667 total transactions were spam during the 10 day period at the peak of the campaign. We show the impact of increasing non-spam transaction fees from 45 to 68 Satoshis/byte (from $0.11 to $0.17 USD per kilobyte of transaction) on average, and increasing delays in processing non-spam transactions from 0.33 to 2.67 h on average, as well as estimate the cost of this spam attack at 201 BTC (or $49,000 USD). We conclude by pointing out changes that could be made to Bitcoin transaction fees that would mitigate some of the spam techniques used to effectively DoS Bitcoin.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    1 Satoshi = \(10^{-8}\) bitcoins. We follow the convention of referring to the protocol as Bitcoin, the currency and its units as bitcoin or BTC.

  2. 2.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3ny3tw/with_a_1gb_mempool_1000_n odes_are_now_down.

  3. 3.

    https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1198032.msg12579271.

  4. 4.

    This feature is used by Bitcoin block explorers, see for example: https://blockr.io.

  5. 5.

    The notation used in the tables corresponds to the notation used for the transaction features defined earlier. Note that both tables include rounded values, while attempting to maintain distinctions for small values with the minimum amount of rounding necessary. For better presentation, we omit some features.

  6. 6.

    http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wikileaks-is-now-a-target-in-the-massive-spam-attack-on-bitcoin.

References

  1. Becker, J., Breuker, D., Heide, T., Holler, J., Rauer, H.P., Böhme, R.: Can we afford integrity by proof-of-work? Scenarios inspired by the Bitcoin currency. In: Böhme, R. (ed.) The Economics of Information Security and Privacy, pp. 135–156. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  2. Bonneau, J., Miller, A., Clark, J., Narayanan, A., Kroll, J.A., Felten, E.W.: SoK: Research perspectives and challenges for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. In: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Decker, C., Wattenhofer, R.: Information propagation in the Bitcoin network. In: IEEE Thirteenth International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P), pp. 1–10 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Kroll, J.A., Davey, I.C., Felten, E.W.: The economics of Bitcoin mining, or Bitcoin in the presence of adversaries. In: Proceedings of WEIS 2013 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Maxwell, G.: Merkle tree of open transactions for lite mode? bitcointalk.org (2011)

  6. Meiklejohn, S., Pomarole, M., Jordan, G., Levchenko, K., McCoy, D., Voelker, G.M., Savage, S.: A fistful of Bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 127–140. ACM (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Moore, T., Christin, N.: Beware the middleman: empirical analysis of Bitcoin-exchange risk. In: Sadeghi, A.-R. (ed.) FC 2013. LNCS, vol. 7859, pp. 25–33. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  8. Möser, M., Böhme, R.: Trends, tips, tolls: a longitudinal study of Bitcoin transaction fees. In: Brenner, M., Christin, N., Johnson, B., Rohloff, K. (eds.) FC 2015 Workshops. LNCS, vol. 8976, pp. 19–33. Springer, Heidelberg (2015)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  9. Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Consulted 1(2012), 28 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Trillo, M.: Stress Test Prepares VisaNet for the Most Wonderful Time of the Year (2013). http://www.visa.com/blogarchives/us/2013/10/10/stress-test-prepares-visanet-for-the-most-wonderful-time-of-the-year/index.html

  11. Vasek, M., Thornton, M., Moore, T.: Empirical analysis of denial-of-service attacks in the Bitcoin ecosystem. In: Böhme, R., Brenner, M., Moore, T., Smith, M. (eds.) FC 2014 Workshops. LNCS, vol. 8438, pp. 57–71. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by US National Science Foundation grant CNS-1619620.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Khaled Baqer

  2. University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, USA

    Danny Yuxing Huang

  3. New York University, New York, USA

    Damon McCoy

  4. International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, USA

    Nicholas Weaver

Authors
  1. Khaled Baqer
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Danny Yuxing Huang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Damon McCoy
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Nicholas Weaver
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Khaled Baqer .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Concordia University, Montreal, Québec, Canada

    Jeremy Clark

  2. University College London, London, United Kingdom

    Sarah Meiklejohn

  3. Université du Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Peter Y.A. Ryan

  4. Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA

    Dan Wallach

  5. Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Michael Brenner

  6. New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey, USA

    Kurt Rohloff

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2016 International Financial Cryptography Association

About this paper

Cite this paper

Baqer, K., Huang, D.Y., McCoy, D., Weaver, N. (2016). Stressing Out: Bitcoin “Stress Testing”. In: Clark, J., Meiklejohn, S., Ryan, P., Wallach, D., Brenner, M., Rohloff, K. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9604. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_1

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-53356-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-53357-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation