A post announcing the cancellation of a stress test launched by CoinWallet bitcoin exchange system has appeared on Reddit just to prompt the community to proceed with the test themselves. That is the way today's Bitcoin Giveaway has been seen by many so far.

Motherboard's Jordan Pearson, quoting an email by the CoinWallet.eu's COO James Wilson claims that the "test" might even go beyond the expectations of the team, with the entire community sending coins from the company's wallets to themselves "and fighting each other to take the coins as quickly as possible".

The trick is in the fact that CoinWallet's administration is not virtually giving away any bitcoins: the users are supposed to come and take them by themselves. For these ends, bitcoins splitted into hundreds of thousands of tiny outputs during the previous tests (so-called "dust") are suggested to be taken for free with the help of the private keys which have now gone public.

The private keys are said to contain 0.53918 BTC each but the users who tried them claim that the very first key in the OP splitted up the 0.5 BTC into outputs of 0.00001, others allegedly being splitted likewise. Thus, the sum of the 200 BTC could be transferred by 20 million outputs 180 bytes each, making in total at least 3600 MB worth of transactions. The backlog which might take place as the result will take almost a month to clear even in case that there would be no other incoming transactions which is hardly possible.

According to James Wilson, whose team in the Reddit post compared the escapade with renting a whole train for a few people, the aim of the unannounced test is to get the community fix Bitcoin which, as seen by the CoinWallet.eu's COO, has been "broken" for some time now. The entrepreneur believes that Bitcoin needs to be improved so that it could survive attacks it may face in the future.

In fact, what CoinWallet is trying to do today is much similar to what has happened in July, 2015 when an unknown spammer sent out bitcoin “dust” worth about $800 in total across the blockchain network. The "dust" consisted of bitcoin microtransactions of 0.001 BTC or 0.0001 BTC and, though small in value, was significantly large in data size. It slowed down the network, causing confirmation delays for standard transactions. The junk transactions were sent simultaneously so that hundreds of those small transfers entered the system in one second. This resulted in thousands of unconfirmed transactions and some users reported that they had to wait up to 14 hours while the normal average confirmation time is about 10 minutes.

Maria Rudina