now. Transactions over a 24 hour period are now back down to regular levels, currently at 33,000 over a 24 hour period.
How did Monero do? Good, though not perfect. On the positive side, the network never went down, the community immediately reacted and remained vigilant, and dynamic blocks did work. For many Monero users, they had no idea a spam attack was even occurring.
On the negative side, it turns out the fee mechanism in wallets was not working properly, causing transactions to not auto adjust their fee to higher levels. This was patched quickly but did cause issues in the short term, notably because of slow updates from exchanges.
Because fees weren't auto updating, they became stuck in the mempool for as long as an hour. Of course, transactions could be sent with an adjusted higher fee from users manually, however this did delay transactions for the thousands of users who didn't.
Also, while dynamic blocks did work, there will need to be continued research into hardening it. The attacker was able to prevent the blocks from increasing by decreasing spam at intervals to offset the 100 block median threshold. This is actually the strongest clue this was spam.
But the biggest issue is from the perspective or privacy, as the effective anonymity of ring signatures can be harmed by a constant spam of this magnitude. According to research, this attack effectively decreased ring signatures from 16 to 5.5.
So what was the reason for the attack? The short period of time of the spam leads me to believe this was either a research effort or a coordinated short term attack or just poking/prodding to see if something breaks.
In total, the 23 days of spam cost the attacker around $10,000.
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