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>Being found out as the source of an attack is the biggest deterrent.

It doesn't seem like much of a deterrent. Suppose we knew for a fact that the attacker was John Smith in Chicago. How would that deter them?

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Because it's a crime that you can go to prison for. And all of the damaged parties could sue you.

It's not a crime to create many small transactions...

It is if you do it with the intent to defraud people or to make a service inaccessible. Same thing with a denial of service attack. It's not illegal to visit a webpage, but it is illegal to visit a webpage millions of times per second to bring the server down.

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