> Quote from: gavinandresen on August 11, 2010, 04:10:56 PM > Bitcoin's p2p network is subject to various kinds of denial of service attacks. > > There, I said it. It doesn't have to be such a breaking change. New nodes could accept old transactions for a long time until most nodes have already upgraded before starting to refuse transactions without PoW. Or, they could always accept old transactions, but only a limited number per time period. I've thought about PoW on transactions many times, but usually I end up thinking a 0.01 transaction fee is essentially similar and better. 0.01 is basically a proof of work, but not wasted. But if the problem is validating loads of transactions, then PoW could be checked faster. A more general umbrella partial solution would be to implement the idea where an unlikely dropoff in blocks received is detected. Then an attacker would still need a substantial portion of the network's power to benefit from a DoS attack. +1 Any demonstration tests at this point would only show what we already know, and divert dev time from strengthening the system to operational fire fighting.
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