Author: Mike Hearn 2012-10-26 14:21:32
Published on: 2012-10-26T14:21:32+00:00
The O(1) work attack can potentially waste the bandwidth of all nodes indefinitely, as long as users are still scanning blocks with the attacker's transactions in them. This can cause active wallets to have their bandwidth wasted for as long as the attack is ongoing. However, once the attack stops, active wallets will no longer be rescanning that part of the chain and new users will skip those blocks using getheaders. Although this is not a new attack, it is trivial to perform a DoS attack on the entire Bitcoin network, but it has never happened, possibly because governments would rather pass laws than carry out such complex attacks. While DoS attacks should not be ignored, there are limits to how much attention should be given to them.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T08:06:10.080057+00:00