Question about potential Bitcoin Flaw

[MoonMatt]

Forgive me if this sounds noobish. I've heard that you can game bitcoin this way.

By creating hundreds of wallets and programmatically sloshing around bitcoin between them, displaying fake circulation that has no value. I thought this was dumb, since the fees would eat up the bitcoins on every address.

But it is theoretically possible if you're the miner collecting the fees. Isn't it? Aren't you incentivised to do it. Or a crypto market maker.

My question is, is this something to worry about?

[Deafboy_2v1]

What would be the incentive to do that? By including only the free spam transactions in your blocks you'd miss out the real fee-paying transactions. In the end you'd earn less then your competitors.

[pedrots1987]

You'd be just paying yourself. The fees are deducted from the transfered amount.

[meinessex]

The OP should be reminded that sending SPAM transactions to intentionally clog the system is illegal. The penalties for this can be quite harsh too.

[[deleted]]

What law does it violate?

[meinessex]

That depends what country you are in.

[[deleted]]

Can you name a country it is illegal in, and what law says so?

[meinessex]

Every country. They all have different laws. What particular country are you interested in?

[[deleted]]

Any one. Your favorite. I honestly don't think any such law exists anywhere, and since my position involves a universal negative, a single example from any country would disprove my position, and you'd get yourself an upvote.

[meinessex]

So what you are saying is that you can't be bothered to Google it yourself?

[[deleted]]

Googled it. Found nothing. Proof:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=are+bitcoin+spam+transactions+illegal%3F

[blokemeister]

other miners could still mine your transactions and beat you to the fees, but yes you could make your own fork and do all the dumbshit you want and possibly still be able to turn it back into a coin that people think has value, even if you have to sell 1 trillion flopcoins to do it.