You are right to some point, it will fail, but it will also give some useful information. You see, even tho stress test seams useless, it does at least show :

-how much "damage" can only one entity/organisation do to the network
-it will show costs needed to do such a stunt
-you can use that data to understand what the next move in securing the network should be.

I'm not a fan of these  "tests" either, especially when they come at a time of my weekly debit card top-up   , but bitcoin is at a point where it will be tested in many ways,
just for people to see it's capabilities, because it's not the question of what can bitcoin do and how it can preform now, it's about how it will preform when it starts doing
what it was created to do - to be the worldwide general audience means of transfering and storing of value.

4k+ unconfirmed transactions, so far.
Total Fees   1.04582505 BTC
Total Size   1922.1826171875 (KB)

cheers

Oh, definitely.  I'm more than in support of stress tests themselves, as they're an integral part of any network.  Basically, I'm just questioning the motive of these recent "stress tests" due to the timing.  I'm assuming it's just Gavin and Mike trying to say, "see, bitcoin is broken, move over to XT", although I could be wrong.

Bitcoin is both core version and xt, bitcoin is not broken. The only question is; is it needed to increase it's block size , and i agree it is.
It makes much more sense to do the "upgrade" while it's still doing the job, rather than wait for it to be too late., don't you think so ?

cheers

Who gives a shit any more? I don't know what they hoped to gain from the first one, let alone all the other blanks they've fired.

I agree with this.  I think this sort of thinking ahead is very important at this stage.

no....
its like a bunch of grumpy maids saying that the pot of water wont boil until 2000 people breath on it and generate enough heat and prove there is a 2000 strong demand for hot water to make coffee...

the stress tests are that if one person making just 1 transaction a second, can cause other peoples tx's to be bottle-necked and delayed.... then waiting for a year until the demand actually forces a upgrade is just waiting for the problem before looking for the best solution...

it is like letting someone sodomize you in your own bed.. before setting rules to not let anal lovers follow you home.


did you know that something like this happened before..
many core coders didnt want to strengthen and expand bitcoin to cope with change.. and it took satoshidice to spam the network for the coders to then stop sitting on their hands and implement code to decrease the spam..

most coders think they are gods. that their code is perfect and does not need changing.. it always takes outsiders to prove them wrong..

to me coders are like people who wont lock their doors and allow themselves to be violated a few times before thinking about whats needed to secure things.

Agreed. The first time was a cute trick. But if this is your new hobby then you should be testing on the "test net". Perhaps you can glean it's use from the name "TEST NET".

Exactly, when governments do bank stress tests they don't disrupt real bank transactions whilst doing so!
I had thought that they should just make an Alt bitcoin, then test that, but yes, Test net seems more suitable really.

It is crazy to think that the entire transaction network can be disturbed by so little money, imagine if someone important really had a grudge, seems like they could take down bitcoin easily!

That's the truth. P2P network are not able to scale well with large amount of communications

In traditional payment network, there is very little transaction done between participants, most of the transactions are cleared inside one financial institution, and settled between institutions. Similar to trading on an exchange, you never really buy or sell anything, you just play with numbers that represent those things in their database. This makes it very scalable, because everyone is accessing the same database at the same place

However, on P2P network, all the databases are spread across the globe, you have to broadcast transactions throughout the network to update each of them, and those communication will increase exponentially with the increase of network size. So maybe raising the block size is not a long term sustainable solution, but at least it is most simple to implement right now