C'mon Coinbase, at least spin them into a '<X> is actually good for Bitcoin, because <Y>' format.
The results were not favorable for bitcoin and highlights key design problems -> some transactions cost $280/transaction to put through, and other transactions that had <$20 fees were not processed and stuck in limbo.
Maybe some people paid fees that high by mistake, but no-one had too. Equally $20/tx fees are still ludicrously high by about three orders of magnitude.
Bitcoin miners prioritize transactions from highest fee to lowest; the attackers never sent transactions with more than 0.2mBTC/KB fees, which works out to about $0.01/tx. In other words, if you paid more than about $0.01 in fees, your transaction was unaffected by the flood.
The problem was a lot of badly written Bitcoin wallets don't let their users set fees at all, nor do they let you resend transactions stuck due to low fees. This is an easily solved problem, and fortunately we're seeing wallet authors fixing it. This should have happened years ago... but a lot of people are heavily invested into the idea that Bitcoin transactions are "free", which just isn't true...
You may find my writeup on the flood useful reading: https://gist.github.com/petertodd/8e87c782bdf342ef18fb
Some would disagree, considering the system kept functioning exactly as intended under the circumstances imposed on it.
Personally I agree that the whole thing is troubling, but was anything really discovered here?
Considering that the price has been rising, if you believe in prediction markets, these design problems could likely be overcome. After all, people have been working on it since long before any of these stress tests were performed.
Yes, hence the GP stating, very clearly, that the results "[highlighted] key design problems".
The results of the stress test were not surprising to anyone who's been paying close attention, but it was a valuable demonstration that Bitcoin is it currently operates is misarchitected and will require some fundamental redesigns in order to operate at scale. These problems have been under discussion since at least 2011 and have been constantly disregarded, so perhaps this will help. It seems unlikely.
Other than increased block-size, is there something that could improve these results? More full nodes?
The backlog has since been drastically reduced and high priority fees are back in the 50,000 satoshi per kb range [0]... the average Bitcoin transaction is about 250 bytes, so 12,000 satoshi per transaction, or roughly 3 cents. Low priority transactions of < 1 cent are still somewhat easily confirmed [1].
Even during the stress test I saw high priority fees hovering around the 85,000 satoshi/byte range, and never in the 1,000,000+ satoshi/byte range that you're talking about.
What's impressive is that the price [2] of Bitcoin was completely unaffected by a bit of weather [3] on the network and in fact gained in value during the entire ordeal.
Public data storage like the ledger maintained by the Bitcoin blockchain has a definite cost and it makes sense that prices would rise as demand increased. The blockchain is a scarce resource. It might make sense for transactions fees to end up around the price of a postage stamp at some point. It's hard to predict how this economic system will continue to evolve.
What's most important is that the ledger continues to be maintained, eventually consistent, secured by lots of hashing power, 100% verifiable and has an open and equal access to read and write as it ever did.
Not every transaction between two parties needs to be recorded on the blockchain. The blockchain is for clearing and settlement. Between lightning networks [4], private federated offchain networks for batch transactions, and possibly public sidechains (if they every materialize), there's a number of approaches that can help facilitate micropayments and other situations that require very low fees.
[0] https://api.blockcypher.com/v1/btc/main
[1] https://blockchain.info/tx/417d1c3ada3744910503d58b464070531...
[2] https://blockchain.info/charts/market-price?timespan=30days&...
[3] https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=30day...
The stress 'test', (or was it really an attack?), is interesting, though it may be too recent to be included. But where did you get that $280 from? That figure sounds ridiculous.
Can you give the source?