Topic: Eligius: 0% Fee BTC, 105% PPS NMC, No registration, CPPSRB - page 113. (Read 1061485 times)

My point was more to question the concept of "stealing" or "theft" of a digital creation.  There is no "taking", there is no "conversion", the "victims" are not left with anything "lesser".  Yes, you are appropriating their computer resources, but they are voluntarily giving their computing resources to run Bitcoin software already, and they are doing so with at least some knowledge of the risks and costs of doing so.

Which is why their neglect of doing so is bad...

Why not? They're bribing the miners to abuse their position to do the opposite of what their job is...

1) Whether it is or isn't, theft of it is still wrong.
2) The thief is paying a bribe so that the "police" allow the theft, when their job is to prevent it. I don't see how that's a positive thing, let alone justifies it.

The blockchain is nowhere near an unlimited resource.

Which is why their neglect of doing so is bad...

Why not? They're bribing the miners to abuse their position to do the opposite of what their job is...

Actually, no. Properly using Bitcoin does not create a never-ending growth of the UTXO database - items get added, and are always deleted later.
Blockchain spam (except when it uses OP_RETURN) permanently adds database entries which can never be deleted.

My original longer-post on this subject disclosed 3 in Mastercoin.


Is there anything like this existing in Bitcoin today?  Something that is produced alongside a transaction and relayed with the transaction, but not reflected in the blockchain?  Wouldn't this lead to a problem where clients would not be able to trust the transactions in the blockchain, because they are not fully self-proving?  What if a bad miner decided to include transactions where the inside hashes weren't relayed?  Wouldn't this cause consensus problems everywhere?

I'm going to selectively quote here, because I feel that we're in agreement on some of this stuff and I'd rather get to the heart of the matter, since this is fairly off-topic already.


Hmm.  Not a good analogy.  1) The "heirloom" is already being freely passed around, 2) the "thief" is paying money to the police who are being charged with protecting/distributing the "heirloom" and thus the "thief" is kind of helping to further protect/distribute the "heirloom", which was the desire of the heirloom owner in the first place.  Tangible-world (limited resources) analogies often don't really equate to digital-world scenarios (not quite unlimited resources, but close enough to make comparisons very difficult).  The miners are the gatekeepers of Bitcoin and the people who are paid money to secure the blockchain.  If somebody wants to use the blockchain for their own purposes, but they pay appropriate fees to the miners then I really can't complain.  I realize that disk space, and working memory space, is not free, nor is it unlimited.  However, this is a larger problem with Bitcoin that is only being slightly exacerbated/accelerated somewhat with "on-the-blockchain" alts such as Counterparty.

The first hash doesn't need to be stored in the blockchain, only relayed to the miner.

The transaction fee method has proven unreliable so far. Humans are chosen to do the job because we can react to changes in spam methods, unlike fixed algorithms which the humans behind spam will always find a method to bypass or workaround.

Why? "If somebody wants to waste a good amount of money to steal your heirloom, let 'em." (analogously equivalent) doesn't sound like an appropriate answer.

Miners are currently receiving a 25 BTC subsidy to try to encourage Bitcoin adoption.
While it is certainly true that we could all start demanding fees that cover the expense of mining and storing the transaction (probably higher than the 0.01 BTC/kB we originally started with), Bitcoin adoption is likely to suffer from that.
It seems to me a much better approach is trying to filter out the abuse and subsidize (only) the transactions that benefit Bitcoin.

The blockchain has always been intended for financial data, and everyone who has it implicitly agrees to store it.
The same cannot be said of any non-financial data.

Miners are neglecting their job if they run mainline mining code.
It is intended to be a (technologically and politically conservative) example only, not used unmodified.
Unmodified use puts inappropriate authority in the development team that we do not want and, of course, neglects to perform the quality of filtering the network needs today.

The first hash doesn't need to be stored in the blockchain, only relayed to the miner.


AFAIK, They were prepared to switch all XCP transactions to use exclusively the 80-byte OP_RETURN at the release of 0.9.0 which was supposed to implement it and which had implemented it in development code until a last-minute change to 40 bytes.  They had been following the development, knew about the 80-byte OP_RETURN and had based Counterparty development around using it exclusively.  When 0.9.0 was released with only 40 bytes of OP_RETURN, they were forced to continue with other alternatives, as not doing so would mean the end of Counterparty.  (Again, this is only AFAIK! I am not affiliated with the Counterparty team in any way, and I have not read the code, and there might be other situations where non-OP_RETURN data storage might have been used, but my recollection is that 80-byte OP_RETURN would have been used for the vast majority of Counterparty transactions.)

Yes, so, how do you filter out spam, given how easy it is to obfuscate arbitrary data using any number of options?  The only real way to do this (and the one that has already been chosen) is by implementing a transaction fee to make such spam efforts expensive in relation to the benefit realized.  But if somebody wants to waste a good amount of money to have something stored in the blockchain, let 'em.  This solution is both effective and simple.  If Eligius wanted to start including only transactions that include 10x the standardized fee, that would certainly block Mastercoin and Counterparty transactions.  I know that I have sent BTC transactions that have taken 12+ hours to be confirmed in a block because, even though they supposedly met the coin-age requirements needed to be fee-free according to the QT client (which did not even prompt me to add a fee), miners refused to include them in a block for that length of time.  And I was left to sit there and stew, and see my transaction as "unconfirmed" for half a day while I'm trying to send money to somebody.  So it seems that a LOT of pools have taken this action of only mining transactions with fees even when technically a fee is not required.

Unfortunately, that did not seem to be the case in my experience. They were more worried about forcing the transactions on miners by hiding them. If there's been a change of heart since then, great. If Eligius isn't mining these properly-formed transactions, they should get in touch.

This is true, but being a valid transaction does not imply a right to be stored by every Bitcoin node forever, be mined by every Bitcoin miner, or be relayed by every p2p node.
Every node has the right to decide for himself what he wants to relay.
Every miner has the right to decide for himself what he wants to mine.

It is also impossible to mine every possible transaction: doing so means inherently unbounded storage requirements by every Bitcoin user.
This is why human miners are charged with the responsibility of filtering out spam.

All Bitcoin users storing the blockchain have agreed to store the financial data necessary for the Bitcoin consensus network.
This agreement was implied by the fact of Bitcoin's design being inherently for such a purpose. Similar implicit agreements are held to be legally and morally binding in other contexts (for example, GPL software that has always linked to GPL-incompatible libraries from the start, is implicitly considered to have an exception in its license terms for those specific libraries).
On the contrary, only some Bitcoin users have agreed to store data unnecessary for the financial functioning of the Bitcoin consensus network.
Those who willfully mine or attempt to have mined such data, are forcing it on every node against (in many cases) their consent.

GBT is definitely the road forward for this, in my opinion. Even if the pool had some way of selecting which policy to use (for example, picking a policy by name with your miner "password"), there is nothing to stop the pool from lying if it is compromised. We need end miners to do their job and provide the transaction selection themselves, or at least independently from the pool itself (for example, "transaction policy servers").

Identification of spam in filtering is an independent matter from whether it is spam.
There are proposals for identification of valid hashes at least (look up P2SH²), but hopefully we won't have to use them...

Unfortunately, that did not seem to be the case in my experience. They were more worried about forcing the transactions on miners by hiding them. If there's been a change of heart since then, great. If Eligius isn't mining these properly-formed transactions, they should get in touch.

This is solved by Bitcoin daughter-chain support - you would be able to pay Bitcoin transaction fees on a conceptual Counterparty blockchain and miners could collect on them.

Stocks are inherently centralised, and cannot gain any direct benefit from being traded on a blockchain.
The stocks have value only because of recognition by the company (to pay dividends) or government (to enforce payment of dividends)
Therefore, the logical place to track the stocks is a centralised registry operated by the company, government, or someone they outsource it to.
Remember that centralisation is more efficient than decentralisation, so with the benefits of decentralisation eliminated, it doesn't make sense to incur the costs of decentralisation anymore.

I'm all for experimentation in general, which is why I don't buy into the "X should leave simply on the basis of it being not Bitcoin-unit denominated".
Daughter-chains should definitely help the situation by making any innovation possible within the Bitcoin framework.
Basically instead of a single blockchain, Bitcoin would now be comprised of any number of multiple blockchains, each with their own possibly-different set of rules.
So, when you want to try a new feature by Joe Random Developer, you just sent however many bitcoins you want to his blockchain.
If you decide you want to go back, you just send whatever you have left there back to the main blockchain (assuming his blockchain didn't allow you to get robbed of them, of course).
In the Counterparty example, you would occasionally fund your wallet on the Counterparty blockchain with bitcoins to spend on fees, and miners would be the ones bringing them back to the main blockchain when they mine your transaction.

I am arguing here more from the point of Counterparty (XCP) than Mastercoin (MSC) here, because I know more about Counterparty and I am more heavily invested in it.  (And I do have some issues with the way Mastercoin was founded/funded and some aspects of its implementation, and I have no such issues with Counterparty.) However, I believe that Mastercoin supporters could generally use these same arguments.

Personally, I question the "social agreement/contract" aspect.  To me, the software/code is the entirety of the contract.  That is kind of the whole point of a decentralized, trustless, electronic currency.  The rules are stated in the code, and enforced by the code.  Any transaction that meets the rules of the Bitcoin code is a valid Bitcoin transaction, by definition.

On the other hand, I do see the validity to the argument that each "miner" has the right to mine only the transactions that he sees fit.  However, I do not think that "pool operator" necessarily equates to "miner" and I would be interested to see a poll or something among Eligius miners asking whether or not they support including XCP and MSC transactions in Eligius-mined blocks.  Not to do so is leaving money on the table, and miners are notoriously ROI-minded.  AFAIK Counterparty is pretty generous with the fees, given the transaction sizes.  (Annoyingly so, as an XCP user.)  (And I am aware of Eligius' support of GBT and promotion of its use, which would skirt this issue entirely as well as ensure continued decentralization for Bitcoin.  Now if only we could get people to actually use it...)

Now, to address your points specifically:

1) I do think that the use of the Exodus address is dumb, wasteful, and leads to the unjust enrichment of the Mastercoin developers.  This is not an issue with Counterparty.
2) As long as the multisig outputs fit the coded definition of valid Bitcoin transactions, they are valid Bitcoin transactions.
3) While it is possible to encode pure data / in a Counterparty transaction, it is meaningless and requires a fee.  It would be the same as if I sent .0000001BTC to address "1HiLukeJrXXXXXXXXXXXXxxxx" using the Bitcoin reference QT client.  The vast majority of Counterparty transactions are indeed financial / transactional in nature.  That is the whole point of Counterparty.

"Basically anything that isn't a pubkey shouldn't be scripted as a pubkey, anything that isn't a hash shouldn't be scripted as a hash, and anything that isn't financial data (not sure if this exists, but it was implied in this conversation earlier that it did) shouldn't appear directly in the blockchain."

How can you tell whether something is or isn't a pubkey?  How can you tell whether something is or isn't a hash?  And again, aside from the small occurrence of true spam (for which the same potential exists in plain-jane Bitcoin), all Counterparty transactions are indeed transactional and financial in nature.  And the Counterparty developers would certainly prefer for *everything* (except for valid escrow/m-of-n situations) to take place in OP_RETURN instead of being encoded in pubkeys or anywhere else.

As for moving to a merged-mined separate chain, the number of XCP tokens never increases.  It is impossible to create them; they are fixed in number, and to change this would basically destroy Counterparty.  Counterparty transaction fees are paid in BTC (except for asset issuance, which requires XCP to be burned forever).  Counterparty users must periodically buy BTC if they make a lot of Counterparty transactions.  There could therefore be no reward for miners in a Counterparty-only blockchain.

Lastly, I have to close with this.  As a supporter of Bitcoin, wouldn't you rather have this functionality (decentralized exchange; like a stock market for crypto-currencies and crypto-assets) exist on the Bitcoin blockchain and be a part of the Bitcoin ecosystem instead of having all of this functionality take place in NXT, BTSX, Ethereum, Ripple, etc. and leave Bitcoin in the dust as a simple/stupid currency-only?  Does the idea of this not excite you?  Think about displacing ALL of the corrupt stock exchanges in the world, with something provably fair and honest and decentralized!  This is what is going to happen, and what Counterparty and Mastercoin are trying to make happen on the Bitcoin blockchain, with Bitcoin as the common price denominator.  Wouldn't you rather be able to buy a share of Overstock directly with BTC instead of NXT, and to have that transaction immortalized in the Bitcoin blockchain instead of the NXT blockchain?  Wouldn't you like to see on the ticker "Shares of Overstock are trading at .05 BTC today" instead of USD, NXT, or some other currency?  Woudn't that strengthen and accelerate the growth and acceptance of Bitcoin to an incredible degree?  It's coming.  One way or another, it's coming.  Overstock is already in discussions with multiple crypto-asset projects, including Counterparty.  As a Bitcoin supporter, would you rather this future be "Built on Bitcoin" or built on something else? 

Honestly it amazes me to hear you suggest that any project should be "on their own blockchain".  What, and derail the work and the value that has been put into Bitcoin?  To someday possibly eclipse Bitcoin?  Of course as a Bitcoin developer, you can't go crazy and implement every weird idea that's come up in every altcoin out there (not that there are that many good ideas in the altcoin world).  Can't rock the boat too much, and you don't want to put anything untested into production.  Stability is definitely the core concern at this point.  But adding new features and value to Bitcoin should also be a priority, and if third-parties are able to do this discretely and "on top of" Bitcoin without disturbing Bitcoin-per-se in any significant way, I think they should be encouraged.

Lukejr, what would migrating to their own blockchain look like? Because it's not just mastercoin, now it's counterparty as well, and who knows how many other bitcoin 2.0 applications in the future. And by merge mining, would Eligius support a mergemined mastercoin/bitcoin2.0 project? What are your thoughts on if Mastercoin/Counterparty were to be run on Namecoin?

tl;dr: People using Bitcoin have all agreed to store financial data and nothing else, using a scripting system to convey it. But MasterCoin transactions include metadata and unnecessary bloat, and lie about what kind of data it is in a way that makes the entire Bitcoin network less efficient.

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From my understanding of MasterCoin, there are two ways I, and probably anyone who considers the blockchain to have a social agreement/contract, consider it spam:
1) The unnecessary 1Exodus output indicating it is a Mastercoin transaction.
2) The abuse of multisig and p2pkh outputs to convey data rather than OP_RETURN.
3) Some of the data may be non-financial/transactional in nature.
Basically anything that isn't a pubkey shouldn't be scripted as a pubkey, anything that isn't a hash shouldn't be scripted as a hash, and anything that isn't financial data (not sure if this exists, but it was implied in this conversation earlier that it did) shouldn't appear directly in the blockchain.

There is also an argument that MasterCoin is competing in supply (one cannot convert more bitcoins to mastercoins or vice-versa) and many users may not wish to support it when they store/validate the blockchain. Note I don't hold to this argument myself, as it seems to logically rule out any use of the blockchain for things like smart property (note that S.P. does in fact not require using the blockchain at all, but if it did, I don't see how it would violate the social contract of Bitcoin).

Not per se related to spam, I think it would also be ideal if Mastercoin migrated to its own blockchain - it really has no inherent need to be inside bitcoin's, and does not benefit from being there either. It does benefit from having bitcoin miners securing it, but that can also be had by supporting some form of merged mining, which is just as safe if those same miners freely support it.

I have no opinion on this, and I'm not ashamed to admit I've no idea what the Mastercoin argument is, do you think you could spare a sentence or two as to why you think it's spam Luke, and perhaps the other guy as to why he doesn't think it's spam? Just something short and sweet to inform the rest of us, not a lengthy troll or anything.

I just joined Eligius today. I have mined with Slush's, Give Me Coins, Ghash.io and BTC Guild. I like what I see a lot and I think that Eligius has some very commendable features, like mining directly to a receiving address which can be locked.

I have set up a small contribution from my mining. Just wanted to say thanks for setting up a great pool and looking forward to working with you more.

Thankfully, this kind of spam is futile to try to force on people, so in the end, all you're doing it making it more work to filter - it's still an inevitable reality that it will be filtered.
Maybe you should rethink your life and stop trying to force others to do things that harms themselves.

P.S. There is no censorship going on. Maybe you should invest in a dictionary.

What you call 'games' we call 'resistance to censorship, and is definitely on our roadmap.

https://github.com/mastercoin-MSC/spec/issues/248

WOW. That's ALOT of BTC...