Topic: Economically Unspendable Outputs: A Problem On The Radar - page 8. (Read 16508 times)

They could hold back those small payments and have them build up until such time as the receiver wanted to withdraw them.


Ditto on bitcoin is "still in beta" - we are all still "early adopters".

People talk about "old" coins, and "aging" coins, to avoid a fee, but what is the actual meaning of "old"? How long do they have to sit, is it a coupe blocks, a couple days, a couple weeks?

21 million times 10^8 Satoshis + 1 satoshi more

 

How much do you bet?

This requires a hard fork, if you create more than 3 additional digits (smallest unit is 1/100th of a nBTC) you overflow an 64bit int and once this is necessary, I guess there are a LOT of other problems first.

Currently there is also a hard cap of 1 million bytes/block. There are ideas to change that, but as it currently stands these are the rules every block on the network must follow to be valid. Of course in the future BTC could be divided down to 100 decimal places, blocks could be 100GB per block etc. - all these things are (maybe?) desirable or wouldn't change the main idea behind bitcoin a lot, but still currently and without a widely accepted hard fork they are out of question.

I bet u r wrong. Some guys say that bitcoins can be infinitely divided.

In recent times mrbigg has started to troll hard with half-true information, similar to a user which name was a certain greek deity who carried the world on his shoulders...

If unprunable dust output becomes a problem, there IS incentive to include "collecting" transaction in the network - you have a big transaction input, but can prune each of these from your list. Once storing your list is more expensive than block space, you include these transactions. If it isn't, it's also not a problem to store them.

Also, there is a hard cap of 21 million times 10^8 Satoshis. You can do the maths how big the maximum set of pruned unspent outputs can get and this isn't even a VERY scary number (Facebook soon will store more data than that). This is the absolute maximum EVER that can be reached, no matter the block size, no matter how many people attack BTC.

By the way, I'm also pissed that SD is using several gigabytes(!) of my HDD space on my full node and only paying miners for including these (I personally believe there should be full nodes not only run by miners or at a loss) but instead of spreading information that I bend a bit to sound informed or plausible, I'd rather release a "no-SD" patch and maybe even binaries for pools to use. There STILL is no real bitcoin client that is tailored towards miners and their needs, most clients are written for end users (=transaction generators, not transaction confirmers).

Also this issue is not new at all, since day 1 SD has been under attack by people for creating 1 Satoshi bitdust. They didn't care back then and they won't change their operations now that they risk their business. Even the "let's track SD earnings" thread in the dev forum was also partly created to also see how much they bloat the block chain.

All you do with this thread is creating a Streisand effect - every publicity is good publicity...

Perhaps mrbigg has privileged access to non-public information? Perhaps this access has something to do with his job of posting amazingly inflamatory idiotic statements such as

?

I've explained why this is false.  Why do you keep repeating a falsehood?  Ax(e) to grind?

Ya, so they stay in the block chain, bloat it, and cause overhead and nuisance.  As long as it is predictable I don't see it as a terminal event.

Perhaps an attacker could use is as a DOS mechanism by deliberately leveraging the weakness at a significant monetary loss.  In that case it probably would be possible to make a fork which a significant chunk of the userbase would adopt (if that is what it took to deal with the issue.)  Or just shift to a crypto-currency solution which didn't have this weakness.

Even with no pruning at all the max chain size still goes up linearly over time. Do you understand that?

You didn't read. Sure, the blocks are full but the problem is that the SatoshiDICE losing confirmations are unspendable and unprunable. Do you understand this distinction? A normal transaction output stays in the block chain until it is completely spent at which point it is eligible for pruning and can disappear forever. It only "bloats" the block chain until it is spent. Compare this with SD's losing confirmation, which can never be spent economically and therefore can never be pruned. Do you get it now? Why won't it read?

Those things aren't mutually exclusive. Part of the advantage over fiat is that it's the market - not a bunch of lofty rhetoric - that decides the allocation of resources.

My thought too.  As long as things are predictable I'm not terribly worried.  At least in terms of bloat, and as long as it is possible to be an infrastructure operator without spending huge amounts of money and thus limiting Bitcoin to be reliant on a handful of well capitalized entities.

Seems to me that as long as the community does not choose to fiddle with the block size, the fees will start to take care of SatoshiDice-class problems and it should remain practical for the system to be operational on the backs of a wide class of operators. 

Start monkeying with the block size and all bets are off.  Possibly this is why things are coded as they are?

And I thought Bitcoin was a fiat-killer, the most powerful idea for the internet since the WWW.
I do hope some other people share this view...

You most likely wouldn't send 1 satoshi by itself. One of the free-bitcoin sources has been sending 1-satoshi payments. I combine them with mining income and other income with my CheapSweep script (google this forum for the thread). It can take a few hours for the transaction to get accepted, but I've not had one not go through yet.

When did the spirit of Bitcoin tell you which applications are most important? Some of my dreams involve weird new inventions that weren't possible before, why should they take a backseat to direct conflict over occupied territory? If we both want the same shared resource for different ends, bidding on it seems like the fairest way to resolve our disagreement. Who knows, maybe provably fair gambling is the "killer app" for Bitcoin.

That "bloat" when maxed out will increase chain size linearly, while the cost of storage goes down exponentially. It's really an anomaly of young bitcoin that we had blocks below the cap this long - for most of bitcoin's future, the blocks should be nearly full.

Everyone who has accepted the spirit of Bitcoin wants a new, peer regulated currency independent of central-banks and civil-liberties-crushing government control. The next thing is they want is for Bitcoin to take some market share from the existing fiat dominated world.

Applications like SD are generating new business within the Bitcoin domain, business which could never have existed before. This is fine to a degree, but this new, internal, business is not replacing general fiat usage or taking market share from paypal or mastercard, yet it is close to 70% of Bitcoin's transaction flow. This means that only 30% of Bitcoin's processing is replacing existing real-world fiat&payments. Even this might be fine, but Bitcoin has a finite capacity at the moment, the max block size, and a further unknown block size limit which is set by the network block propagation latency and verification time (remember, only 10 mins between blocks).

There is a potential risk, which looks to me a big risk, that SD-like applications will grow to consume nearly 100% of Bitcoin's capacity. At that point the "improve the world" dream will be on life-support. There is also the problem of unspendable outputs bloating the blockchain.

We are asking that SD optimize itself to at least buy some time.

Yes, that's the currently agreed ruleset.  So what's the problem again?

You've gone from saying they can't be spent, to they can't be spent for 6 hours?  Come on.  And not every bet is a losing bet.  And you can spend 3 or 4 satoshis at a time.

No, you can easily get a total of combined inputs and outputs of 6 or more without raising the cost from free.  Have you looked at what's happening in the actual blockchain, or the logic for free transactions?  And if you're paying the 0.0005 "minimum" anyway you can get away with a lot more inputs and outputs.

What exactly is wrong with this "bloat?"
Blocks won't go over the size cap, so it's fair to clients.
SD is paying enough in fees for miners to accept, so it's fair to miners.
Speculators get slightly richer from lost coins and increased popularity.
The only people who are worse off are other senders because they now have to pay a market price instead of tips.

Isn't this what we signed up for? Transaction fees go up, subsidy goes down?