Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

When will the spammer be ready to use?

Very soon we will enter the next testing period. Sign up if you want us to inform you about any progresses.

How high is the reward?

In the future, this will totally depend on how many iotas the community donated to the IOTA Spam Fund (more donations → higher reward) and how much spam was created recently (less spam → higher reward). This creates a scenario in which spammers compete against each other and spamming becomes most profitable when it is most required: when nobody else is spamming.

However, currently the maximum reward is set to 5 IOTA per confirmed transaction.

Will you support node owners?

We initially planned to eventually offer financial rewards for node owners. Roman Semko has stated that he is working on a paid node concept, therefore we are excited to look into making that compatible with our spammer once both projects are ready.

So this is basically mining for IOTA, right?

Yes and no :)

From the perspective of a spammer, this is just like mining. You offer your computational resources and earn tokens in compensation for your expenses.

However, for the network and the whole ecosystem behind IOTA there are some fundamental differences to mining:

Why have some donations been moved?

In 2017, we have already rewarded 8.58 MIOTA. Therefore these funds have been removed from the donation address. Because we think that transparency matters, you can convince yourself in our archive file from the last testing period (you can also download it directly from the tangle here - that's quite cool isn't it?) that these funds were indeed earned by spammers. Make sure to use perma nodes for checking these addresses.

Why is the project currently paused on mainnet?

During the latest spamming period (ending Mar/07) confirmation rates could not keep up with the massive spam our spammers were creating (sustained 20 transactions per second). It became apparent that we have to wait for the new tip selection algorithm.

Therefore all mainnet spamming will be stopped until the IOTA Foundation provides us with any kind of upgrade. Meanwhile you can earn iotas by spamming the testnet (use v1.0.11 and start the jar file with the option '-testnet').

Note: We will send an email update around once we are sure that the mainnet can handle much more spam. Make sure to subscribe to our →newsletter.