Educational Byte: Spam Protection in Crypto Networks

Spam usually refers to email spam, which involves receiving unwanted messages like junk emails or annoying texts, often sent in bulk to advertise or trick people. Of course, those unwanted emails could revolve around the cryptocurrency topic, but that’s not the spam we’re going to explore here. Instead, we’re going for the equivalent inside the various crypto networks, per se.

In our case, we’re referring to transactions, instead of messages. Sometimes, certain crypto users, malicious or not, could send transactions in bulk to the network, making it slower and impeding other transactions going through. So, we can say that spam transactions are unnecessary or inefficient actions that strain the system, whether intentionally or by mistake.

Spammers might aim to slow down the network, overwhelm mempools (where unconfirmed transactions wait to be processed), or broadcast unwanted content. For instance, attackers might flood a chain with very low-fee transactions to create backlogs or send meaningless payments between their own accounts to waste resources. That’s a spam attack, and crypto networks have developed some tools to defend against it.

Spam Shields in Crypto

Likely, the most common method to protect against spam transactions involves using transaction fees to discourage unnecessary activity. For example, Bitcoin prioritizes transactions with higher fees, making spamming expensive and unsustainable. This system allows the network to focus on more valuable actions while giving users flexibility—lower fees mean longer wait times, but their transactions still get processed eventually. However, this can make frequent or large-scale usage costly, especially for businesses handling many payments.

Another way to address spam and high demand is by improving their transaction capacity. Networks with higher throughput or larger block sizes can handle more activity without becoming overwhelmed —up to a point, at least.

For example, Ethereum 2.0, with its transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and sharding, aims to significantly increase its transaction capacity, allowing it to process many more transactions per second than its previous version, reducing the risk of congestion and spam. However, even with these upgrades, high demand or spam attacks can still cause delays if the network is pushed to its limits.

An additional technique focuses on the source of transactions. Networks like Kin and NEO prioritize activity from verified entities or users linked to trusted services, reducing spam at its origin.

While this method can ensure smooth operations for priority users, it might introduce fairness concerns, as non-verified users may face restrictions or delays during spam attacks.

Spam Protection in Obyte

In its latest upgrade, Obyte has introduced two powerful mechanisms to protect the network from spam attacks. The first one focuses on defending against large transactions that could overwhelm the network. In simple terms, when a transaction exceeds a certain size (10 kB), an additional fee (called oversize fee) kicks in, making it exponentially more expensive as the transaction size grows.

This fee, which is burned (removed from circulation), makes it costly for malicious actors to flood the network with excessively large transactions, ensuring the system remains stable and decentralized without putting excessive strain on full nodes.

The second mechanism addresses the risk of too many small transactions overwhelming the network. In Obyte, every transaction needs to be processed by all full nodes, so sending a high volume of transactions could slow things down or even disrupt the network. To prevent this, we introduced a fee structure that increases exponentially as the transaction rate (transactions per second) rises. This ensures that if too many transactions are being sent, spammers will face higher costs.

In order not to kill the legitimate uses of the network that still require large amounts of data, we introduced an additional feature that allows posting temporary data on the Obyte network without the oversize fee.  This makes it possible to verify large amounts of data without high fees. The temporary data is stored on the DAG for just one day, and after that, it’s removed, but a hash of the data remains to verify its authenticity. This prevents spam attacks while keeping the storage burden manageable for nodes.

Together, these new features ensure that Obyte's network can handle all kinds of spam attacks effectively. They provide an efficient way to maintain decentralization and stability by adjusting fees according to the size and frequency of transactions while offering an alternative to high fees through temporary data. As of now, Obyte is more decentralized and secure than ever before.

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