Topic: Finney Attack against SatoshiDice or how to get 250 BTC per solved block. - page 2. (Read 6147 times)

Miners (and the network) will not see the impact as long as the block reward far exceeds other network costs, like unspent transaction output set (UTXO) storage.

Hehehe I wouldn't be surprised, he seems to be okay with using violence against peaceful people to get his way. Good thing neither SD nor myself are based in NY, or the US for that matter

I don't see where I said it was better to do it that way than for Satoshi Dice to change.

If Satoshi Dice is not willing to change that would be the best way to go. If they aren't willing to be reasonable then I don't understand why miners would just complain publicly instead of doing something about it. They aren't helpless. They have options other than complaining.

So it makes more sense to integrate policy into all the mining nodes versus a single actor changing their behavior?

Mind boggling...

This probably means that Luke-Jr had already reported you to the New York state crime autorities as somebody that runs a gambling racket. That's the "bet" in the original quote and it matches the modus operandi of Luke-Jr.

Erik & fireduck,

you should just offer a private betting addresses for your most demanding clientele. Basically have them login to your website and reserve a private set of betting addresses. Require a deposit, eg. 1BTC. From then on a private bet of 1.01BTC would mean than 0.01BTC is in the play and 1BTC is a conduit that you'll always return, both with the won bets and with the lost bets. A kind of a "refundable door charge." A sort of a thing that all decent casionos demand: evening attire. The casino will not strip the players from their clothes, even if they "lost their shirt" inside.

Good luck to everyone.

Nobody is forced to mine Satoshi Dice transaction. Miners can set any fee policy they want for transactions to and from those addresses. If it is causing so much damage they could just refuse to mine those transactional at all and make Satoshi Dice either pay more or mine directly.

Satoshi Dice is a perfect example of "Tragedy of the Commons".

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

They know using the blockchain as a signaling device is causing other effects, but they could care less.

Logical fallacy.  That logic precludes incentives that encourage block chain efficiency.

You cannot simply get stuck in the loop

     spam system -> demand system upgrades -> go to step 1

as that clearly lacks any amount of self-examination or dynamic feedback.

I think of SatoshiDice as a proof by reductio-ad-absurdum that the Bitcoin needs to be continue to evolve to be really useable, lest it turns into a permanent worldwide register of dropped pennies.

Many developers associated with the core development team have lots of self-worth staked on the assumption that the Bitcoin is already perfect.

Your business is showing them that they were wrong. This is no longer a technical/scientific/business issue, it is now an issue of respect and/or self-respect.

I remember a comment from one of the professors in my university:

Q: Why are the panel discussions in this school are always turning so nasty?
A: Because the stakes are so low.

Well, Satoshi's Dice seems to me like going to a casino, exchanging one USD in chips, playing a round of a game, changing back to USD, changing another USD to chips etc.

This described attack might also work with p2pool by the way, then you only attack with your own hash rate though. Still useful for people with ASICs at their hands and you can also mine a bit larger blocks there, as you will relay blocks at a lot of different places in the network as a bonus.

What does the State of New York have to do with anything?


Roughly 3/4 of SD transactions are financial transactions, and 1/4 is "information".  Every inbound bet is a financial transaction, and roughly half of the outbound transactions are winnings going back to the user. When a user loses a bet, the response is indeed an "information transaction" and this seems to be what you are so upset about.

So if SD played by the rules you wish to enforce upon it, 75% of the transactions would still be there.

Also, where is this "no information" rule listed??? I was not aware that Bitcoin had a Terms of Service contract.

But there is a far more important point to all this. Every transaction that occurs on the BTC network causes data to be stored in the blockchain. You, Luke-Jr, have sent transactions which cause blockchain bloat, you just haven't sent as many as SD. And if your transactions are "well and good" then how many do you need to send before you are considered "spamming"? Can SD only send 10 transactions a day before you get angry with it? Or 100? Or 10,000?  Is it because they are "evil gambling transactions" which makes them less worthy than your own?

I'm of the opinion that Bitcoin should be used as much as possible. It should be the monetary system of the world. And if the blockchain can't handle it, then the system needs to be upgraded or is doomed to failure because guess what, as Bitcoin grows, hundreds of creative systems are going to come out which use the blockchain in all sorts of strange ways. SD is but the tip of the iceberg.

SD does very good job - It stress-tests the system. The Bitcoin programmers ought to thank instead of blaming... and do their best to resolve technical issues.

With the approach taken here, it might be possible to not only passively act, but actively fight SD spam by shifting the odds in your favour if you really don't want to see them continue with their business.

Edit: Since blocks are anyways small, it might even be possible to just mine "normal sized" blocks as well, to not be too obvious.

No. Bitcoin is not meant to scale to SD's abuse.
Also, while adoption grows, so does the overall network capacity to cope with higher (reasonable!) use.
Finally, we already know Bitcoin is harmed by SD's abuse in practice. Continuing to "stress" something after you know it harms it, is clearly hostile.

What-ifs are kinda pointless to argue, so I won't try.
But even if SD is to credit for bringing attention to some performance problems, it does not justify their continued attacking.

While Bitcoin software is still in development, SatoshiDice provides an invaluable service to the network by stressing those attributes of the system that would become a larger problem in the future when adoption grows.

It does it in a very careful and controlled way (centralized, easy to shut down) thus providing an incentive for developers to prototype solutions that would deal with an ever increasing volume of transactions gracefully and ahead of time.

We probably wouldn't have performance improvements that we do (in bitcoin-qt 0.8.0) if it wasn't for SatoshiDice. So it seems like a natural component of the ecosystem at this point which might get less popular as the network rebalances and changes some of its characteristics that make SD viable right now.

I fully agree on this! But for me it seems more like rulea of conduct which *should* be followed by consensus, but are not enforced in any way (unless miners really start skipping sdice transactions). Or is this somewhere defined in the protocol?

This is a valid point and I do get it. Not sure what I think about the whole thing, but I do get this.

If Satoshi Dice really is profitable on its own merits then they could afford to mine their own transactions instead of paying other miners to do it via transaction fees. If they could do that and still remain profitable then nobody could rightly complain that they were leeching off of the network.

In the long term when medium and large companies are using bitcoin that's what I expect to happen anyway - the companies doing the most transactions have the largest incentive to make sure those transactions get included in the blockchain so they mine themselves or band together with other companies to form a merchant pool.

No. SatoshiDice violates the "no flooding" and "financial transactions only, no information" rules. Bitcoin's solution is to block flooders. Miners filtering out floods is part of the system.