Transaction / spam flood attack currently under way

Oh, right he did it earlier for sure, same address I sent the coins to. I assume he split it up and is now using multiple computers.

Go back about 1 day and you can see a bunch of .06 trades to and from the address MrBurns put in his thread.

That's a good point about fee competition, but I'm wondering about near-term implications of this spam flood, too, like

• What happens to the transactions that don't make it into the current block?  (somewhat rhetorical question... the answer is "they keep piling up in memory" AFAICS, but that raises a bigger question -- how to deal with ever-larger TX cache?)
• Will this create a de facto situation where TX fee is required for "normal" bitcoin users?
• Would it make sense to introduce a consensus blacklist, of abusive bitcoin addresses? ie. miners could -- at their discretion -- simply drop TX's with the blacklisted addresses.

Oh, I agree. Well, I'm not going to praise him, we were already aware of the possibility. Apparently, "no incentive" isn't good enough and we need an actual cost of some sort. Well... actually there is some tiny cost to him, so I guess we need a little bit bigger cost. An increasing marginal cost really would be good.

I mentioned a minimum required [age]*[size] could be required by miners in the other thread. Maybe with a portion (10-20 transactions?) with no requirement.

Perhaps in addition to the age priority rule recently implimented, there should be a minimum age rule without a transaction fee.  Said another way, perhaps a generation rule that says that a free transaction must be 3 blocks deep before it can be transfered again for free.  This will still allow real users to immediately spend new funds if they have to, while still permitting real users to reshuffle funds to suit their needs without an overhead cost.  I think that this would significantly inhibit the type of spamming attack that is currently underway.

Only a little.  If the rule is generally known, and the reason for it, I think that those like the bitcoin faucet could adjust.  I'm talking about limiting based upon the coins movement, if that's possible, not a three block ban upon a particular address.  The new client has 100 addresses, correct?  If bitcoin faucet has more than BTC .05 in each address, and simply rotates the addresses as the requests come it, then it can service 100 requests in half an hour without delay, and more with delays.  I'm not saying that transactions can't be created, just that generators will not put them into blocks until the transaction that they depend upon is three blocks deep without a fee.  With a fee, they can do whatever they want; and the generators probably wouldn't honor a 3 block delay upon a fee paying transaction anyway.  This leaves the possibility of free transactions an open possibility, while inhibiting spamming.  If there is a technical reason that this rule cannot work, I wouldn't know about that.

EDIT:  Markets that are trying to service withdraw requests would know how many requests have been sent in the previous 30 minutes, and could choose to warn the requester that such requests may be delayed by this rule, or they can choose to pay a fee out of it.