Hacker News Reader

Comment by brndnmtthws | Hacker News Reader

The spammers have been 'caught' on a few occasions. The patterns definitely look like transactions which have been generated by a script with the intention of filling the mempool to push up fees. I've also seen screenshots of Telegram chats where people discuss doing this on Reddit and elsewhere (although I can't find it now, and there's no way to verify authenticity).

Coinbase passes the fees directly onto their customers, and they don't seem to care much. They also don't let users change the fees. In fact, Brian has started shilling Bcash on Twitter, so one might guess they're intentionally pushing up fees to push an altcoin (Bcash).

Protip: GDAX pays the TX fees, so it's possible to workaround the TX fees by moving your coin to GDAX.

View on HN

Well is it really "spam" if they are paying the same rate as you? It also points to tx fees being extremely necessary, as without them what would stop a malicious actor from spamming SIGNIFICANTLY more, clogging up the blockchain making it so a miniscule fraction of the real transactions could get through?

Also, I'm well aware of GDAX and coinbase and their pitfalls and benefits, but that doesn't have much to do with the discussion of fees and why they are necessary.

AFAIK RaiBlocks is the only coin that has tried to build a compeletely feeless cryptocurrency. Whether or not it will actually work, I don't know, and the current implementation has a lot of issues. But it's interesting if you're in to crypto. Furthermore, Lightning Network could provide a similar feeless system (excluding the settlement TXs).

>Furthermore, Lightning Network could provide a similar feeless system (excluding the settlement TXs).

There are even ways to get around the extreme majority of the fees for settlement transactions! Look up Channel factories for an idea on how even the opening and settlement transactions can be reduced to about 10% of their current size/cost for a single user. And there might be ways of interacting with channel factories to keep those settlement transactions off the main blockchain for the most part!

Also, I'm fairly certain IOTA doesn't have any TX fees, as well as several others that came before RaiBlocks.

IOTA has a few red flags:

- partially closed source

- has its own custom crypto

- uses a bizarre internal trinary digit system, instead of binary

- I've heard that it doesn't actually work, as in, you can't perform transactions

In terms of the top ~25 coins by market cap, AFAIK RaiBlocks is the only feeless one which acutally works. Regardless, it's worth watching these coins to see how the economics work out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com