Topic: Economically Unspendable Outputs: A Problem On The Radar - page 12. (Read 16508 times)

You guys have restored my faith in the forum community, very well said

+1

This is so obvious I'm astounded that people keep parroting SD as a "problem."  Let's say I shut down SatoshiDice tomorrow, has Bitcoin gotten stronger? More resilient? More impressive? More worthy of global commerce? Here's what would happen:

1) People would see that Bitcoin was so vulnerable that one of its leading advocates had to shut down one of the most profitable Bitcoin sites because the Bitcoin network "couldn't handle it."  Perhaps it would make it into the press with the headline, "Bitcoin too weak to support one small gambling site"

2) Bitcoin's usefulness for mini- or micro-transactions, or even "numerous transactions" would be abolished. There'd be significant in-fighting over what constituted "microtransactions" and "transaction spam."

3) Any other person or company could and would create new services (like SD or totally different) that also creates many transactions. The "problem" would then be back, perhaps much bigger. Any "progress" gained by exiling SD would be very swiftly lost.

But at least Luke-Jr, misterbigg, and their cohort of whining babies would be happy because they "saved Bitcoin"  

Bullshit.

Not every user of the network is acting in its best interests. On the contrary: there are and there will be many people who will try to destroy the network or simply use it for their own means / their profits without caring about how this affects other users.

We need to be prepared for everything, not whine around because somebody is using a known vulnerability. Vulnerability needs to be fixed and that is end of discussion.

If anywhere this should be solved at the protocol level, not at the social level. The bitcoin system should be completely agnostic about the intention of a transaction.  All it should be concerned about is the total cost of a transaction, both to the miners and relay nodes.

If people start using patched clients to block transactions based on perceived intentions, we are going to get into a huge mess.  Players like Satoshidice are going to start obfuscating their intentions, resulting in arms race, and before long there will be collateral damage, and innocent people who's transactions look like their intention is X,Y and Z are going to have them blocked.

It's going to be a bit like the old financial system. After some players misbehaved, government introduced rules like 'trading X with the intention to speculate is prohibited'.  Of course, this didn't stop traders from speculating, it just encouraged them to repackage their financial instruments to make it look like it's not speculation.  

These intention-based rules only make the financial system more complex, less transparent, less fair, and less stable.  We really don't want to do the same to Bitcoin. Let's keep it simple please!

So who gets to pick who gets to spend what they want however they want? Just because YOU and HIM don't like SDice means they don't get to use bitcoin??

I have an idea. How about you go print your own fiat and regulate all you want. If you're worried about SDice wasting satoshis or the blockchain getting large then you don't understand bitcoin. Neither of these are a "problem". Stop fear-mongering.

The developers will address the issue and as we both know are already well aware of it. Your "raising awareness" is just your attempt to create FUD. Asking the actors to act in the network's best interest is the wrong approach. In the short term, a better solution would be for pool operators to detect this "abuse" and voluntarily decide to not include these types of transactions (matching this pattern) into their blocks rather than just "banning" certain addresses.  

Its economically unfeasible to spend a Satoshi today (and that affects pruning) because a Satoshi is less than the current standard transaction fee. No shit. That doesn't mean that it always will be. Guess what happens if the block size is never raised? It becomes economically unfeasible to spend a mBit or uBit because the transaction fee rises (in BTC) and a BTC's value drops (in USD or whatever). That makes this exact problem worse.

Your motivations become more transparent by the day.

With fiat, $0.01 is the minimum transaction because that is the smallest unit created.  In Bitcoin the smallest unit is 0.00000001 and should be able to be spent just like a penny, but it is uneconomical because of the way Bitcoin is transferred you usually have to pay a txfee.  If you are just discovering this, you need to go back and read some more.  With that, you can still send Bitcoin without a txfee, good luck getting it included in a block though.  I used to send Bitcoin all the time without a fee and it was usually always included in the very next block.  The problem is not Satoshi Dice, the problem is that Bitcoin is still being developed and tested.  I think this needs addressed by the developers and is not so much of a problem now, but will be in the future if adoption and price continues to rise.   

That all being said, "can" Satoshi Dice do something about this to help the network short term? Yes.
Would it cut into their profits? Yes
Will they do anything? Probably not...

I would point out that pruning doesn't have to be binary.  It can be probalistic.

For example the active transaction set could exclude all spent outputs and all unspent outputs below a certain threshold, it could even exclude very old outputs.  Essentially the active transaction set is acting like a cache and using probalistic functions to try and balance resource requirements vs cache hit rate.

If a transaction is created which uses an output not in the active set then the details could be fetched from the full unpruned database.   If is even possible that some nodes wouldn't maintain this locally and simply query other nodes by sending the tx id and requesting details.

SD inefficiently uses a critical resource.  Basically it comes down to you either believe in free markets or you don't.  If you really believe in free markets then the market will solve the problem of inefficiency.  More valuable transactions will crowd out SD ineffcient use of the resource.  SD will adapt either by raising min and thus collecting same revenue using less of the critical resource, or by moving transactions off blockchain.    If you don't believe in free markets then Bitcoin will fail eventually anyways.  SD isn't a problem, Bitcoin is.

Personally I believe free markets are the most efficient allocator of resources (including space in a block) and thus SD isn't a "problem" long term.

Neither Roger Ver nor Jon Matonis are principles of SatoshiDice.

When did I ever suggest we "ban" anything? You're thinking about someone else's thread and patch. I never said ban.

You're right that developers need to address the issue. But for now the best us non-developers can do is try to raise awareness and use social pressure to encourage the actors on the network to act in it's best interests (although I concede that might be a long shot).

Misterbigg, first of all, let the programmers solve it (you have no authority on the matter)
Second, please stop spreading fear and panic
Third, banning *anything* will be the end of bitcoin

If you read the post, then you understand that these outputs can never be realistically spent, since they would cost more in fees than the amount received.


If your proposed change was to go through, an attacker could cheaply flood the network by first creating a lot of dust, then sending it to himself, and finally creating many transactions that spend the dust as an input using the lower fee.


The transaction volume wouldn't be a problem in the future since we will regularly reach the 1mb limit. It's only a problem now because the network is young. But the transaction volume is only one part of the problem. The other part is the unspendable.

Every time SatoshIDICE sends a losing bet transaction, every current node and every new node must keep a copy of the transaction until the end of time.


Raising the max block size would make the problem worse, since even more SatoshiDICE transaction spam would be permanently etched into the block chain, with no possibility of getting spent.

Right. There is an attack, but it's originating from the OP.

Exactly. This whole thread is complete bullshit and waste of time.

Sorry but thread title is misleading.

I don't see the problem. Raise the max block size limit and problem solved.

SDice is only sending so many txns because it's cheap. When it becomes expensive, they'll stop (or find some other creative way to do what they do). People will use the blockchain however they're allowed to. All you're saying is that you don't trust the design of bitcoin to handle this stuff and you want a centralized "solution" to something you don't like on the network.

Go use fiat.

Miners are the ones with the voting power here. Specifically, that voting power is weighted based on their ability to quickly download blocks and transactions, solve blocks, and then push the blocks out to the network. Right now, this is based on their hashing ability. If the blocks start to become too large because of transaction volume, it could take minutes instead of seconds to push around all that data over networks, which would impact the speed of solving blocks. If the fees aren't high enough, the miners may decide to start pruning out transactions in order to gain a leg up on the competition. AFAIK, we aren't there yet, except for a few pools that don't include SDICE transactions.

I don't think we have a real issue until the average fee that the miners demand for inclusion in the blockchain becomes too large for most of the users on the network. The likely reaction to that would be for specific applications to move their traffic onto internal networks, which would take some load off the blockchain. If the network became too fractured, then obviously that could be a potential flaw.

And if you want to block transactions going to/from SDICE, you really ought to be convincing the mining pools to reject them or charge higher fees, since they are the only ones who can do something about it.

Right now, the whole fucking Bitcoin network is plausibly deniable money laundering 

The problem of unspendable outputs can be fixed with dust collection algorithms in the clients.

With every transaction the coin selection algorithm can check to see if any dust outputs can be included as an input without causing the transaction to require a higher fee.

Because we are to free block things we dont like. We are in this together.


But, doesnt this news mean we could use a few more nodes? With seven billion people in the world, the total amount of transactions needed can be averaged out, even taking the "spam" uses into account.


One of the more higher-ups than me, who is probably a member of the Bitcoin Foundation, said the blocks need to be made bigger and started telling folks to change settings and to reject some traffic.


Whatever we do, lets fix this. If more nodes will work, lets do it, if rejecting some traffic that is unacceptable to the community will fix it, lets do it. If we are all washed up here, and there really is no problem, lets find that out as well.