Topic: Could BitCoin Ageing be a solution to BlockChain bloat? (Read 278 times)

Discussions about whether and under what circumstances you can steal money from one group and give it to another is always going to be met with a thumbs down from the group you want to steal from. 

this sounds like a bad idea because it would be bad for the pseudonymity of bitcoin, by forcing everyone to renetwork to move coins

Here's your intelligent discussion ... Keep your fucking hands out of my wallet you god damn thief.

You have made a valid point in that in this current situation that bitcoin has found itself, there is need for serious thinking out of the box in making the situation a better place. However, the suggestion you made from where I stand, are not improvement rather they are complete deviation or alteration of the initial plan.

On the issue of returning coins to coinbase or any place at all, that is centralization which is making some body have direct influence over the entire bitcoin. The number of years you suggested is another thing because with the potential that bitcoin has, some people would keep beyond 8 years who should then repay them in case they come back for their bitcoin.

Other ways should be suggested on improving the current situation but not this.

Relax, I was just looking for an intelligent discussion, and thank you for useful and enlightening inside!



Oh there is flat earth thread. Neat!

Colorblind, as I told you in the other thread where you raised this, there is already an altcoin which does this.  Go there.  Or else, go to the Flat Earth thread.  Either way, understand that this will never happen in Bitcoin.  There are certain iron-clad, carved-in-stone, oath-bound-on-pain-of-death rules in Bitcoin, and this is one of them; you may as well suggest inflating the monetary base beyond 21 million bitcoins, or requiring KYC checks to transact Bitcoin, or making transactions reversible by an Appellate Court of Bitcoin which holds tx override keys (or perhaps via “the execution of an irregular state change” as decreed by the Grand Poobah in Chief).

I am not even remotely interested in further expounding on the technical reasons why this idea is a non-solution to a non-problem; for the idea itself is reprehensible.  You are advocating massive theft—and you are advocating the total destruction of Bitcoin.  That does not even deserve serious discussion.

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Edit—P.S., one technical argument:  You should learn to spell “aging” before you write a proposal about it.  A respect for the simplest orthography is the handmaiden of sound monetary policy the basic honesty of not stealing people’s money.

^Eh good point

Of course not. From a perspective of a long term investor, I'm going to store my coins securely for a long time. Who's going to remind them by the way?
Isn't it his Bitcoin? Why can anyone choose to do anything with it?
The problem is that, at that point, every single node, now or in the future will have to gather all of the information about the previous transactions and ensure that an address doesn't have any activity. That alone is hard, since Bitcoin does not currently store the block height(IIRC) of the UTXO in the database. This means that everyone has to rescan their blockchain. UTXO is added and removed even before the transaction gets into a block.


You can't make any blocks irrelevant. The whole goal of Bitcoin is for the full history to be available and verifiable. If you aren't allowing that to happen, you aren't running a full node at all since it isn't trustless anymore. Someone will have to ensure that the past information remains verifiable and accessible and that results in centralisation.

Yeah, it won't take much hashpower by itself.

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It's more about an issue with the morals than the technical difficulty. I fail to see how this would help in scaling Bitcoin since someone has to store the "irrelevant" history of Bitcoin as you've stated.

You will also be forcing a lot of transactions that otherwise wouldn't have been made. People who are forced to move their coins if they don't want to lose them.

1. I don't see a big deal to move all your coins once in 5-6 years.
2. Agree. But if he has private key he can just move it. Of course this way everyone will be able to deduce some information about his activity but it's not like people don't expect him to return at some point. Just a little bit of certainty.
3. It should be done only once - at certain block height block header will contain information about all aeged coins.
4. Let's say coins can be spent only if their age less than 700 000 blocks. This means that after block #700 000 all previous blocks become irrelevant. This means we will always have hard cap of blockchain size. We can limit it without fear it will grow out of control. We can say "Blockchain can never be more than 1 TB (this isn't that much tbh)" and make blocksize bigger without fear of centralization (scenario where normal users wouldn't be able to host full node because they ran out of available HDD space)
5. It won't take more computing power. Miners will only need to check if coins that are being spent in tx are younger than certain age. It won't affect POW at all and POW is what consumes computational resources.

You do know that this has been considered before, and you are aware of “significant downsides”, due to the discussion which ensued when you asked this a few days ago (q.v.):


For my part, I like how gmaxwell addresses this (bold/large text in the original) (permalink):

satoshi, err sorry god to a few people around here needs a good slapping around the head because he designed
a system that solved one problem and created many more that we are just starting to see.

What size did he think the ledger would become if just one billion people out of seven did one transaction a day ?

if all this data could fit into a single database (it cannot) then what size did he calculate the index would be given that paged
indexes are quite slow and given the terabytes of data would need replicating for a decentralized system then how
on earth did he ever think it would scale given that to calculate if a wallet owns the coins each previous input to the
transaction would need to be located from disk file or the DB and processed which results in something called
tree walking in DB terms.

We have 90KWH of electric needed to just process one transaction at about 250 bytes in size and it costs $1-2000 of electric alone just to mine one
digital coin so does he like the sound of cars reviving the engine and going nowhere or something or does today's current
speed of a mere seven transactions a second impress him because he works for general electric.

Sorry people but the king has no clothes on but if you like this block-chain (Linked list) so much then
maybe you should try going in the nude too because a single AS400 could perform more work then all
the BTC hardware put together and costing billions in chips and power consumption needed to handle what we
have today (200gb data) and that's without having to clock the chips. 

250 bytes * 7 = 1750 bytes or 14kbs which is slower than any modem I can remember and me and the internet go back a long time.

Academia has pulled the wool over your eyes, wake up

 

Didn't we already do this?


Only since 2011.  And even then, people could tell it was a terrible idea.



Moral issues of theft notwithstanding, depending on who you ask, anywhere between two and four million coins are lost forever, so how would you divide up these stolen funds so they don't just all appear in the first block mined after the idea is implemented and make one random group of miners beyond obscenely wealthy?  If you're not simply dumping them all into the economy as one big lump (and causally annihilating confidence in the market), how are you determining what proportion of the stolen funds goes into each coinbase reward?  

Even if you could come up with something that sounded reasonable, it's still altcoin territory.  No matter how many flaws you think you've overcome, this will never be implemented in Bitcoin.  If it was meant to work that way, it should have been implemented on Day 1.  Doing it this far into a blockchain's lifecycle is just moving the goalposts.

This has been discussed ad nauseam, but why is it okay to steal someone's coins if they are saving them?  Whatever this proposed coin would be called, it wouldn't be bitcoin.

It kind of sounds like the United Bitcoin fiasco where they are doing the same thing with coins that weren't removed in a prescribed fashion (not just used, but you had to send them to yourself) between early November and early December or before January 3, 2018.

Whatever you do with aged UTXOs, why do you link it with block reward halving, block size, or blockchain size?

The first two points are the most important... Bitcoin exists as a decentralised payment system without central authority.
If we would "steal" satoshi's coins (or at least, add the value of the unspent outputs we THINK are satoshi's to the block reward), it would be a very bad precedense.
From then on out, your balance would never be safe again... If we, as a community, did this (even once), what would stop us from voiding the unspent outputs belonging to a central bank, or maybe steal the unspent outputs from all addresses we believe are BTC hoarders?

Hey, I know this is probably was considered before, but why not make coins have limited age before they return to coinbase? Say if coins have not been moved for 8 years it "returns" to coinbase (i.e. become unspent) and become minable. This way coins that was unspent for certain amount of time will eventually reenter circulation, we can discontinue block reward halving practice, eliminate satoshi's stash (or force him to reveal himself) and reintroduce destroyed funds to the market. This will also limit blockchain size so we would be able to use much larger blocks, allowing much more tx/second since blockchain size will be capped. More I think of it, better it seems from scaling perspective.

I know I probably missing some significant downsides but I can't see something that can't be compensated.