Could there be an exploit by creating millions of meaningless transactions?

Question

Would it be possible to hamper the network's efforts in validating blocks by creating millions and millions of bogus transactions- simply sending back and forth say 0.1 BTC from address A --> B --> C --> A and so on endlessly? Obviously this would hard to do by hand but if there were an automated script it could be done theoretically quite easily..

Or would this strategy have absolutely no effect?

The OP does not speak about dust (small transactions and 0.1 BTC seems big enough). He speaks about cyclic transactions. — Salvador Dali, Dec 09 '13 at 00:41
well, basically that person would be paying a shitload of transaction fees or would cause transactions without fees to be delayed. Big whoop? — Murch, Dec 09 '13 at 03:29

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 08 '13 at 04:02

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You need to provide fees on bitcoin transactions, in which case, you are producing economically valid transactions and will run out of money eventually.

Currently the min fee is 0.0001 (BTC).

Listed here - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

answered Dec 08 '13 at 04:02

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I can not see where it is written that fee is compulsory. – Salvador Dali Dec 09 '13 at 00:43

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 08 '13 at 04:15

You can to a certain degree abuse the fact that very large amounts of Bitcoin will be free to make a transaction with. There's at least one address which has been sending the same coins to itself many hundreds of times and abusing this. In most cases this is prevented by the transaction fee, which is one of it's primary purposes.

Could there be an exploit by creating millions of meaningless transactions?

2 Answers2