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Many wallets have recently received a transaction with advertisement for an inflation pool in the memo text. With a fee of 0.001 XLM, massively spamming the Stellar network seems to be pretty cheap. Is there any plan to prevent such behaviour in the future? The only thing I could find on the stellar website is this bit that mentions DOS protection:

There is a nominal fee, referred to as a base fee, associated with each operation in a transaction. The sender of the transaction incurs the fee.

The fee functions as a deterrent: Though nominal, it discourages users with malicious intentions from flooding the network (otherwise known as a DoS attack).

The base fee is currently set to .00001 XLM. The fee will increase if the system suspects an account is submitting transactions with the malicious intent to bring down the network.

Source

How does this mechanism work? How is malicious intent being detected and what is the maximum fee a transaction could incur?

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The only spam protection currently in place is the transaction fee of .00001 XLM. This is very cheap, and doesn't totally prevent spam, as we saw in the case of the recent stellarpool spam. It is, however, (hopefully) enough to make it somewhat expensive to spam the network enough to cause congestion.

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    isn't it stated to increase if the system detects malicious intent?
    – manjuu5
    Jan 19, 2018 at 8:20
  • I think not, the netwrok does not increase fees when the transactions becomes congested. This ofcourse is a scalability issue, and with increase adoption of stellar, transactions will increase and spams as well but the fee charged per transaction should increase correspondingly to make it efficient.
    – Aditya Sengar
    Jan 19, 2018 at 19:32
  • Playing in the laboratory, it appears that you can increase the fee you are paying when you submit a transaction. This feature probably functions similarly to other blockchains such as Ethereum; it will give your transaction priority over other transactions in the case of network congestion. I don't know if or how well this works though considering the lack of incentives for validators to prioritize transactions.
    – user3803688
    Jan 21, 2018 at 21:24
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As Ben Ayles has said, currently the only spam protection in place is the transaction fee. This subject has been discussed a few times on Reddit.com. Notable ideas to combat this include filtering them out at the wallet level and the addition of stealth addresses.

Sources: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/7pp7nt/stellar_memo_spam/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/7r96rz/a_personal_note_about_the_stellar_network_spam/

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