Topic: Economically Unspendable Outputs: A Problem On The Radar (Read 16492 times)

I have to give credit where credit is due. evoorhees appeared in #bitcoin-dev and temporarily shut down SatoshiDICE to make things easier for the mining pools and developers to fix the problem with 0.7 and the forked block chain. I believe this thread has been successful at raising awareness of the issues. It is unfortunate that it had to be done this way but Bitcointalk is a rough-and-tumble place.

Now that all the players are aware of the issues, the noisy replies have overcome the signal, and that SatoshiDICE showed some good faith I think it's time to lock this. Thanks to everyone who participated!

Memo. When the chain fork is resolved and post-mortem out the way, ask gmaxwell how many dead puppies are in block 225430 on the 0.8 chain.

Miners should care about the policy of the mining pool they are mining for. They should ask for something similar to https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1605900 to be implemented on their pool.

In practice, miners and mining pools don't tend to care for bitcoin long term.

Just get BTCGuild, 50BTC, DeepBit, and Slush to remove all transactions that don't have at least a 0.01 BTC fee attached to them or which don't have at least 0.01 BTC per each output.  The solution is really, really easy and makes miners more money.  Miners have room to be greedy.

Clients will learn real quick to incorporate fees, and SD will learn real quick to stop making these spam transactions.  There's no reason that SatoshiDice just couldn't present the user with a page for each transaction showing if they won or lost, and use up their own server space instead of that of the block chain.

It's not even remotely a problem, the pools just need to act now to preserve the integrity of the block chain.  And I'm guessing we'll see this within the next month or two, and SD will be forced to change its ways.

haha bitcoin not flawed look now today is value 48 dollar by end this year 1000 dollar no flaw in this syste just hold value up rich

At the moment a transaction only needs a fee of 0.0005 BTC, but costs the network ~$.10 in storage alone (for the full duration it's not spent). The fee doesn't go to the network however, it goes to the miner. Miners have the incentive to include as much transactions as possible.

See
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1608087
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1608413

I thought that the fees would somehow automatically rise in cases of high traffic.
Would not that be the most market-friendly and efficient solution?

That's something miners have to do, basically.
And most of the big ones are already neglecting to care, so good luck with that :/

Can't the bitcoin clients make it impossible to make transactions of less than, for example, 1/10 of a cent worth of BTC.
IMO it wouldn't make much difference for the daily user and the limit can be lowered gradually in steps as BTC rises in value.
Or am i missing something?

This is the situation. The alarm is sounding already!

(my bold emphasis)

The block 224736 is 1/2Mb, which is the biggest they get at the moment, and it is almost 95% full of SatoshiDice bets.  This type of transaction source is indeed basically unbounded as the number of users it has is a tiny fraction of the potential audience. Further, an uptake of bot usage will alleviate the "bottleneck" of humans pushing a button, ensuring that bets can hit the blockchain at an ever increasing rate.

We just had a monumental debate about the 1Mb max block size limit on this forum, and the significant reason for that debate is that it is a hard fork. Yet the growth of this type of transaction flow makes the hard fork almost inevitable in 2013 whereas it might not need doing until 2015 at the growth rate of all the non-SD business. Needless to say, a hard fork is best executed when everyone has the maximum time to upgrade at their own pace beforehand.

I do not blame SD one iota as they are using functionality as it is presented. There is a weakness which Bitcoin has at present for "flooding" by legitimate fee-paying transactions. The answer is to slowly push back when the loading becomes excessive so that transaction sources have an incentive to optimize.

Unfortunately, a number of people consider this to be the appropriate response:

Can we make, at least, some kind of "dead puppies" alarm?

Well, that also has a downside.
No decisions would be taken even if they were nessesary.
I can't stress enough that any good system has both rigid and flexible parts.
Too rigid or too flexible and it can not work.
In between is a field of stable change and adaptation.

A perfect democracy is hell for minority views.
Grey is the new grey.
Way to go.
 

Why?

Having an opposing opinion about where bitcoin should go doesn't make him an immoral? In this case it just makes him a skeptic at worst?


Doesn't seem like he's advocating any form of communism, fascism, statism, or pedophilia...

What about reducing the current .005 fee and making it mandatory so that you cant actually spend amounts lower than the fee. If it becomes too expensive to send the minimum amount you can always reduce further.

Allowing SD to send tx of .000001 when the fee is .005 is part of the problem.

tldr everyone should pay the same fee rather than variable fees.

Last I heard the miners are being subsidized by the market assigning $1150 to the block reward, even if no transactions are included!

Since "flooding" is being evidenced by "dead puppies" then one solution lies in this approach:

For sources which exhibit dead puppy behavior the fee required for inclusion in a block needs to increase exponentially for each additional transaction

Up front I will say this is a technical challenge, but not impossible, and there are some very capable people here who could take a shot at it.

SatoshiDice needs to keep going so that when a change like above is made it will organically force a change in behavior (which will be SD internalizing or netting transaction flow). Then we can have some confidence that a recognized attack vector is blocked.

Please stop assuming that bitcoin was designed perfectly and open your mind to reality. It's a shared resource which is being exploited according to a set of rules.

The correct solution to the street pissing scenario is to give everyone an incentive to clean up their own piss.

I don't know the history of this. It looks to me that he already tried to communicate, but the people in charge don't see this as a problem (and maybe conflict of interest has something to do with it). Now he's effectively demonstrating. Besides the noise, I don't see anything wrong with that, per se.

That I can agree with.

I also want to point out that the timing of this debate is impeccable, given the discussion about increasing the block size limit. Because an increase in block size without fixing the issue of intentionally unspendable outputs will likely increase the exposure to this attack vector.

So this issue has to be sorted out before we allow the network to shift to the next gear.

Thanks, that's reassuring and all I needed to know.  I don't care about your political alignment beyond that

Free association is the only solution.