Topic: [ANN] Litecoin - a lite version of Bitcoin. Launched! - page 358. (Read 1467474 times)

So you just want to delete from wallet those spammy 0.0000001 transactions?
Easiest way would be making new wallet and transfer all your coins to it but if you can figure out better way to do it please, share it with us  

coblee, the option to automatically start litecoin on system startup doesn't seem to be working for me.  Running on Win7.

You can't delete transactions from the blockchain.  Any block chain currency validates transactions by tracing them back to their genesis.  Any coin you receive was mined from somewhere and has a "history" which allows it to be validated.

Once something is part of the block chain it is there forever.  Block chain pruning can be done but it has to be done at a network not individual level.
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(emphasis mine)

You can't delete transactions from the blockchain.  Any block chain currency validates transactions by tracing them back to their genesis.  Any coin you receive was mined from somewhere and has a "history" which allows it to be validated.

Once something is part of the block chain it is there forever.  Block chain pruning can be done but it has to be done at a network not individual level.

The file size of my wallet is now 320 MB. I could just delete the transactions from the wallet file, just need to figure out how...

I'd certainly say it needs someone to design a nice solution rather than just try fiddling the fees (and you can now make the fee lower )
My first thought on the subject is similar to your idea Coblee of treating the system as it is - new and thus restricting things to help slow it down.
Also, since txn's are much faster than BTC it probably wouldn't hurt to put certain block restrictions in there that would be considered too extreme in BTC but certainly not in LTC at the moment.
Maybe even restrict the actual size of the block? (getwork would also have to handle that) and have it grow over time so it may not even require adjusting later ...
Just my 2c worth (I'll also have a think about it myself overnight ...)

That's my thought also. And since we find 4 times as many blocks as Bitcoin, the exemption in terms of time is about the same: 4kb per 10 mins.


Bitcoin has been around for more than 2 years now and its chain size is still only ~700mb. If we grow 1GB a year, it's not that bad but forcing everyone to download 1GB of mostly useless transactions is stupid.

Yeah, sure, it's not as if hard drives were 3 times as expensive now as a few months ago...

2MB/day, thats less than 1GB per year, nothing I personally worry about. I'm sure he'll loose interest soon.

I guess you could do that and then when honest transactions become more numerous increase the exemption again.

It's still happening because some miners have not upgraded and they are happily include the spammer's transaction that don't include enough fees.
If you look at http://blockexplorer.sytes.net/block/9171504e9427f74c02a0b2ad6167832f974ee2959135025a8407b7e9f4a74cef you will see that his transactions are being charged less than 0.1 ltc.
If he was following the new fee rules, we would have need to pay 200x the fees he paid, or 200 * 0.2205 = 44.1 ltc.
So until enough people start to use the new code, you will still see these transactions creep in. Of course, if he had the resources, he could find his own blocks and pay no fees, but he's not doing that right now.

The other disturbing thing I'm seeing is that after the fix has been released, he started sending 2 ltc to himself and maxing out on the 4kb of free transactions per blocks. So you see those blocks with 14 transactions: http://blockexplorer.sytes.net/chain/Litecoin?count=500
13 of these transactions + the generate transaction will max out the amount of free transactions allowed in the block. I know it's the same guy because I followed his transaction back and saw that the same coins were used in both of these attacks. Just look at this transaction: http://blockexplorer.sytes.net/tx/456af81d3bfa3d92ca03e04066aaceca64babeec961dd1474026706eaa4459d9
Some of those coins were used in the 2 ltc spam and the rest were used in the 0.00000001 ltc spams. This guy is really annoying since he seems to have a deep knowledge about how to take advantage of the transaction fee rules.

From the wiki: So 14 of these transactions are costing him nothing b/c he's sending them to himself. This is not as bad as the first attack, but it will still grow the chain by about 2.3mb a day. (4kb * 576 blocks)
This is not a big problem with bitcoins, because Bitcoin has a lot of honest transactions that use up the 4kb in the block, so these spammy low priorties transactions will take forever to get included in a block. So a similar attack on bitcoin is pointless. Since Litecoin is a new chain with not that many honest transactions, it's silly that we are forced to grow at 2.3mb/day by this Litecoin-hater.

I will need to think of a way to combat this. The first thing that comes to mind is to just reduce the 4k exemption for free transactions per day to something much smaller. Maybe instead of allowing 13 of these transactions, we only allow a few to get included in a block. I can reduce the 4k exemption to 1k. This would reduce the chain size increase from 2.3mb/day to 575kb/day. The downside of course is that free transactions might take longer to get written into blocks. I would have to double check, but I don't think the client will let you create transactions without enough fees. So this only applies to people that modify their client to do 0 fees. Let me know what you guys think.

Still happening: block: 34123, 5 minutes ago ...
(and http://explorer.liteco.in/ gives a bad gateway error so I can't give a link)

Edit: the block value is 50.22050000 so I guess they don't mind paying the fee.
Thus the higher fee (higher than bitcoin) isn't completely successful.
Block size 412,072 bytes (using my own block explorer I wrote)

Lots of transactions is not bad. Large transactions that sends small amounts of coins to lots of outputs is bad. The fix is not arbitrarily forcing the number of transactions down. It is only going to incur a fee on low priority transactions, which are those that have lots of inputs and/or outputs and uses small amount of coins that don't have a lot of confirms. Again, please read the wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

But isn't that the wrong solution? Isn't the purpose of any crypto-currencies to be successful and attract a lot of transactions? Having a lot of transactions (of course, not spam, but that's irrelevant) should be the target, am I correct? If so, then arbitrarily forcing their number down is the wrong action...

I was hoping to see some creative development in the other direction - having a lot of transactions while maintaining a small footprint on the blocksize and network load.

Congrats to that quick decision combined with a new client.

Now its much more expensive to spam around and the "normal" transaction stay cheap as before.

That was the point to be solved ---> excellent work!

Thanks. I hope it's clear why we need this transaction fee. Since this is a p2p network, sending large transactions (in terms of bytes) will add strain to the network to propagate those transactions and to store them. Look at how much the block database has grown from these spam transactions. So the increased fees is to combat that. If you want to waste other people's resources, you can but you need to pay for it. And most transactions will still be free.

Let me shorten that for you:

Yes, from what I can tell the Bitcoin fees were always around 1/10 of a cent. Anything less and it will make it cheap for an attacker to spam the network. So that's why I decided on 0.1 LTC for the fee. Anything less and the attacker will just keep on spamming. Could I have started a poll and asked people for what they wanted? Sure, but do you know what the vote would look like? Everyone would vote for very very low fees b/c no one wants to pay any fee. But people don't understand why we need a fee right now. So I actually have to make a decision to set a fee higher than what people wanted because I have to weigh the importance of using the fee to deter an attack with people's desire to have no fee.

So yes, I made a decision that I thought was best for Litecoin. I felt like I had to act quickly before the transaction spam gets too out of control. And getting everyone to understand why we needed a 0.1 LTC fee would have been an impossible task. Look how many posts I had to make on this subject, and still, most people don't even understand that the fee is not a static fee that's applied to every transaction. So if people want to keep on discussing this topic, please read this wiki page and try to understand why we need a fee for low priority transactions: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees


In the future, as ltc price goes up, I will reduce the fee to keep it at about $.001. I don't think we need to have a poll or a long discussion whenever I decide to lower the fees, right? Or do we? If people really cared, I will.

We can discuss to see if there are better solutions. I thought of tying the fee to the current difficulty, which is loosely correlated with the price. That way we don't have to constantly change the fee and we will let the market determine the fee. Gavin had ideas about letting miners set the fee somehow. But I'm sure a lot of people won't be happy about that solution. But all this will take a while to flesh out and implement. In the meantime, I made the fee structure effectively equivalent to Bitcoin. And I was surprised to see so much complaining on the forums.


I'm shocked to read that... I really don't know what to say.

Thanx for your hard work coblee. I, for one, endorse your changes assuming you do keep up with the value:fee proportion. Perhaps a poll would calm other's concerns when it becomes time to change the fee.

EDIT: Just found the Windows binary... There's an old link in the body of the first post.

I'm not sure about when bitcoin first came out, but the minimum fee was 0.01 back when bitcoins went for around $0.10.

I also think a 0.01 fee for litecoin would be better than 0.1.  Are you going to open up a thread on liteco.in to discuss this?