The ZSAs will potentially bring more traffic to the Zcash network so, while the recent spam attacks might be frustrating, they can also be seen as a stress-test of the Zcash network’s capabilities before the real traffic. What are your thoughts on this?
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Exactly, it caused a lot of problems while everyone had to scramble to address it, but in the end it was a free stress test on the network. Thank you, spammer!
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Wasn’t the execution fairly trivial in practice? Couldn’t it be tested ahead of time on a testnet? Why wasn’t it, if so?
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Good question, it could certainly be done, but I guess everyone was busy doing other stuff and no one bothered to test it. Certainly a mistake in hindsight, but it was a trade off, we could have spend months fixing it and maybe no one would ever spam it.
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I think without the spammer nobody would have dealt with it. The spammer showed the problem, ECC solved it. I also think that spam in a bull market would have caused much more damage.
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Load testing is not exactly an exotic topic in software development.
Imho, spam attack should have never had happened, especially because there were some early warnings of such possibility back in 2019 (Denial of Service · Issue #3955 · zcash/zcash · GitHub). Although large tx attack is now considered as finished, some damage is irreversible: syncing full node from scratch is a pain when it comes to affected blocks, despite all code optimizations that followed as a remedy. So, if spammer deserves to be thanked for bloated blocks db, the equal share of “gratitude” should be attributed to whomever decided to ignore the warning.
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