Doo Wan Nam: Contributor
In a perfect world, blockchain technology is used to increase efficiency, reduce operations costs, and maybe most importantly, increase trust between two parties. These effects are made possible by the fact that a middle-man is removed from the equation. Without a middle-man there are no uncomfortable spam transmissions garnering for your undivided attention. That said, spammers gonna spam and we all have to deal with it.
We witnessed one limitation of the Ethereum blockchain late last year with the CryptoKitties fiasco. Although that issue has been largely resolved, it revealed a major challenge facing potential mass adoption of the network. The problem amounted to something resembling spam clogging the network so that common transactions couldn’t get through efficiently. Starting July 17th, the spam returned.
Outbound transactions from this wallet began at 6:41am (GMT+9) and didn’t stop sending nicetokens, an ERC20 token, for over 12 hours. The person or people operating the wallet obviously took a nap as there was a several-hour break following the next blizzard of outbound transactions. The new round of transactions did not stop until just recently.
There is a relatively low amount of transactions that can be settled on the network at a single time. That limit was stressed to the maximum with CryptoKitties, and it is currently at the maximum again. Users have been reporting for days that their transactions are taking hours when they should take moments, or that their GAS prices have skyrocketed. GAS prices are the cost of making a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain.
What is the real danger of this, though? It could simply be a benign yet annoying hiccup in the network. That, however, is not the case as outlined by Martin Mikeln from Eventum. He commented that “The spammers are prepared to pay about 50ETH per hour. They spam so much per section that miners won’t even mine any more on a section because it isn’t profitable and regular users still have to pay the higher transaction price.”
Therefore the spammers seem to have exploited a major flaw in the Ethereum blockchain. It has forced miners to stop mining, users to pay wildly increased transactions fees, and voters at exchanges such as Huobi or OKex to take notice. A coin at those exchanges gets listed by a voting system within the exchange.
Mikelin continued, “If they have an economic system behind their activities, this is something that is completely sustainable for spammers. It could be very profitable because it may even get them listed on an exchange based on their voting systems.”
A sustainable, profitable system of spamming the network could be disastrous. It doesn’t necessarily mean you will be seeing nicetokens at an exchange near you, but it could very-well mean that others attempt the same scheme. If the Ethereum team ever needed a reason to implement some improvements, now would be the time.
