Topic: Alert: chain fork caused by pre-0.8 clients dealing badly with large blocks - page 5. (Read 155564 times)

Bit City has a privately run train system. Its shareholder's capital is being pumped into it at a regular pace until passenger volumes increase to make it self-funding and then profitable. In order to encourage passenger numbers Bit City Trains (BCT) are offering family tickets at a rock-bottom rate, hoping to attract groups instead of just individual commuters, some of whom pay well for a seat already, yet overall commuter revenue is not high.

Bit City has a bus company called Efficient Coach Interchange (ECI) owned by Mr Dihsotas, which has some ticket revenue, but, by itself is not profitable. Lo and behold there is an opportunity.  BCT has a network which goes to all suburbs and even neighboring towns. If the ECI buses went to all those places he would make a good profit on all the customers which would flock in.

Mr Dihsotas decides to park his buses at all the stations and sells tickets to all destinations. The clever part is that every passenger who buys a bus ticket automatically gets adopted into Mr Dihsotas' family, so they get to use the train network during their bus journey for a low price. This is so popular that soon there are thousands of passengers crowding BCT's trains, forcing extra rolling stock to be used. The trains are often full, but BCT shareholders are not making a profit yet, even though family tickets are making more money than all the commuter tickets combined. There is also a steady stream of complaints from regular commuters about lack of seating, long queues, platforms too short for the extra carriages, it goes on.

Bit City Trains has the illusion of success but something is just not right. The share price is high, but for how long? At the AGM one of the shareholders heckles the board saying that Mr Dihsotas should not get the family discount tickets anymore....

We've long-passed that point months ago...

That whole camp is now up to badgering and harassment... full-on FUD mode...

-- Smoov

It was the suggestion that SD spend their money how he wants or he will block them that made it sound like extortion to me.  Looking at the dictionary definition, it probably doesn't exactly fit, but his tone is certainly coming across to me as hostile.  For example, he ends with "This is the real choice", as if his two options are the only options.  Maybe I'm just too sleepy  .

It's arguable if it's extortion or not, I just imagined headlines that we could see soon:

A Bitcoin venture is blocked due to very high income!

He is telling us what we should, in his opinion, do.

We don't have to do it.

-MarkM-

Yes.


That's different from solex dictating that they "should be" blocked.  You are free to do what you want, but not to tell me what to do.

Huh? Him exercising his freedom to spam and me exercising my freedom not to include his spam in blocks I create, or even not to pass them along to my neighbors, is extortion?

Or him extorting from me, by spamming, the coding-minutes it'd take to filter him out is extortion?

-MarkM-

Sounds like extortion, doesn't it?

When everybody is happy, liberty has died.

-- Smoov

Equilibrium is an old Indian word that means "nobody is happy."

"minimal" fees, which just so happens to follow the rules when it comes to transactions and the inclusion of fees... if you don't like the "minimal" fees on small transactions, then lobby to get the fees changed on small transactions... _ALL_ small transactions... don't just go targetting SD specifically. They are just following the system in place.

-- Smoov

           small (bets < 4 BTC) |  3522656

What's wrong is they're spamming the chain with microtransactions with minimal fees causing a lot of dust that will bloat the chain. It's not healthy.

It is a small fraction of the total revenue, swamped by the block reward, Collectively revenue is doing very handsomely at the moment anyway:
https://blockchain.info/charts/miners-revenue
does Bitcoin need to be forced to have high fees at this time?

The problem is that the SD volume is essentially unbounded and is stress-testing Bitcoin quickly towards a known limit (the 1Mb block size) but now also finding a previously latent limit (default number of db locks) along the way.

I posted this only a few hours before the chain fork situation arose because I was worried about SD accelerating Bitcoin to the 1MB limit.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1612165

My suggestion was to slowly push back flooding ("dead puppy") volume with higher fees targeted at that source.
Ultimately SD is under the control of the Bitcoin community. But what it is doing could be replicated in an attack by a malicious group.

Cumulative Fees Paid:        2837.93797500 BTC

What's wrong with the fees paid? Those all went to miners.

http://coincompare.com/themes/bitcompare/images/bitcoin-fork.jpg

I'm not saying to leave the 1MB limit in place.  I'm just saying this statement is incorrect:


Exactly.  Make the blocks too large too quick and watch the storage of the blockchain become centralized.  There is plenty of room to expand it without too much concern, but just throwing out the limit completely would never achieve miner consensus.

The fees and block limits discussion is long past due, they are intricately connected. Tighter limits on blocks will lead to more competition for scare resources and thus higher bids (fees) paid to process transactions.

User pays.

Expanding block limits to ridiculous sizes will ensure that blockchain maintenance becomes a rich man's only game .. i.e. only Google, Facebook and Citigroup can afford to maintain full blockchains. Conversely it will keep fees relatively lower for longer ....  decisions, decisions. But better we are kept aware of the impending changes before being rushed into them by an employee of Google.

there also exists the "amicable separation" solution and to split into a little persons chain BDB and big guys chain levelDB?

Available slots only works for just so long, and then you MUST adjust it.  Minimal fees are fine as long as the network continues to grow and flourish.  If you are collecting 0.2 - 0.5 BTC per block in fees right now that is GREAT!!!  Because if the network increases 100fold that could rise to 20 - 50 BTC per block.  I know there are other factors to consider, but I am hoping that in 16 - 20 years (yes I'm not looking at tomorrow or next year or two) Our reward for solving a block will be higher than the 50 BTC we started with.

Miners will certainly want to limit free transactions, since they cost money to store.  There is also the argument that with unlimited block size we will have a tragedy of the commons situation where everyone uses minimal fees.  If there is a limit, transactors will compete for the available slots, driving up fees.  It's not as simple as you seem to think.

Um, is it just me or are they really SUPPORTING the network with the fees they are paying on transactions?  In 16 - 20 years this is going to be our bread and butter tx fees will likely hit 25+ bitcoins per block within that time frame if my math is even close to correct.  (not showing my math here, because it is filled with a lot of conjecture and guesstimation and I really don't feel like having it picked apart.)  If we think competition for blocks is harsh now.  Just wait until we are looking at 10-100k tx per block and fees that are 5x+ what the generated coins are, also consider that bitcoins will likely be in the $100-$1500 range by then (likely higher) as long as the network stays strong.  The adoption is there now.  We just need to keep stability in the network.  We need to get this shit figured out with larger blocks, because eventually with fees being the major source of income, no one will want to LIMIT block size.