Marathon has just attracted popular condemnation by launching Slipstreama service for validating non-standard Bitcoin transactions.
How to Make Money Clogging the Bitcoin Network
This is the second time that Fred Thiel’s firm has provoked such an outcry. This was already the case in 2021 with the censorship of transactions on the OFAC blacklist…
The American miner is once again making a mistake with a system facilitating “registrations” that Taproot Wizard scammers use to transform Bitcoin transactions into casino chips.
These inscriptions of ordinals and other shitcoins which are expensive in memory undermine the decentralization of Bitcoin. Not to mention the explosion in the size of the UTXO set which extends the time of IBD (Initial Blockchain Download). It already takes several weeks in some regions to install a node!
This does not seem to bother Fred Thiel who declares in a communicated :
“Most services allowing direct submission of non-standard transactions [ordinals] to a pool are rudimentary. Slipstream offers savvy users a simple, transparent and reliable way to add these transactions to the blockchain, provided they follow the Bitcoin protocol. »
As a reminder, transactions are relayed between the nodes of the P2P Bitcoin network before being inserted into a block by a pool. This is when certain transactions considered “non-standard” are filtered to prevent certain DDoS attacks.
Bitcoin Core nodes, for example, filter transactions weighing more than 100,000 (virtual) bytes. This type of abusive transaction, even if valid in the eyes of the protocol, is not relayed to the pools.
However, it is possible to bypass the nodes to validate a non-standard transaction by directly contacting a pool. For example to insert a jpeg occupying 100% of the block and eliminating thousands of transactions in the process.
But Marathon has its own pool which allows it to offer this service “ Slipstream “. In other words, the miner hopes to take advantage of the growing popularity of filters aimed at countering registrations.
The reactions were not long in coming. The Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dash and founder of the Ocean pool wonders “why Marathon attacks Bitcoin” ?
His colleague Mechanic told him:
“All you’re doing is making it more difficult to exploit nodes for three francs six sous.
Anyone who cares about the long-term viability of Bitcoin can only judge such actions as short-termist, if not an outright attack.
The transactions you request are filtered by nodes for very good reasons.
This is the second time that you have attempted to undermine the foundations of bitcoin after the censorship of transactions placed on the OFAC blacklist. »
It is worrying to see Marathon making money by offering services that undermine the decentralization of Bitcoin…
To go further, don’t miss our article: Bitcoin hit by DDoS attack.
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