Topic: Finney Attack against SatoshiDice or how to get 250 BTC per solved block. - page 3. (Read 6127 times)
February 26, 2013, 08:00:04 AM
What some people here do not understand that it's not SatoshiDice that is to blame for the inefficiencies of the blockchain. That service is completely following the rules of Bitcoin. It's a fee-paying, fair service, I see no problem with that. The problem is with Bitcoin, not with S.DICE. That should be very clear.
February 25, 2013, 10:38:53 PM
I think Satoshi Dice should mine its own transactions instead of paying fees.
That would require them actually investing in hardware and not sponging off all the other miners.
They could hire a pool to allocate some percentage of blockspace to free SatoshiDICE transactions.
Or they could improve their efficiency by doing things in a different way. You shouldnt change the underlying protocol just because they are "lazy"
Im just glad they cant lobby a politician to get them to change it
February 25, 2013, 10:34:14 PM
I think Satoshi Dice should mine its own transactions instead of paying fees.
That would require them actually investing in hardware and not sponging off all the other miners.
They could hire a pool to allocate some percentage of blockspace to free SatoshiDICE transactions.
February 25, 2013, 10:32:19 PM
I think Satoshi Dice should mine its own transactions instead of paying fees.
That would require them actually investing in hardware and not sponging off all the other miners.
February 25, 2013, 08:30:34 PM
I think Satoshi Dice should mine its own transactions instead of paying fees.
February 25, 2013, 07:25:34 PM
February 25, 2013, 07:16:04 PM
True enough. And enough of this OT.
February 25, 2013, 07:12:48 PM
You do understand that Bitcoin either suffers from higher fees at some point or weakens and dies completely?
Yes. "At some point" needs to be after Bitcoin has attained critical mass of adoption.The only question with option 1 is how much the fees will rise, not if they will rise.
And when they rise. Timing is everything. February 25, 2013, 07:00:25 PM
I don't think that trying to ban S.DICE is a proper solution to anything. Higher fees are a solution, even if it does affect regular usage somewhat. As far as I know, majority of S.DICE transactions come from martingale bots which would be very much affected by higher fees. For the martingale strategy even small differences make it much more suicidal. It's exactly these kinds of spammy gambling transactions that should be deincentivized.
Transaction fees are just another form of a ban, one that is suicidal to Bitcoin in this scenario.You do understand that Bitcoin either suffers from higher fees at some point or weakens and dies completely? Those 2 options are the only possible options if we continue to use proof of work. Option 1 is achieved by limiting the block size and letting scarcity come in, with the goal of retaining sufficient hashing power, leading to higher fees. Option 2 would be achieved by removing the block size limit entirely, which would let us keep non-existent fees but that would weaken Bitcoin to the point of easy destruction.
The only question with option 1 is how much the fees will rise, not if they will rise. Debating about if they rise or not is not a debate because it's a certainty. I'm concerned about them rising in a way that still keeps Bitcoin competitive with mainstream money transfer mechanisms. If they rise beyond that, Bitcoin adoption will die, as you said.
February 25, 2013, 06:55:04 PM
I don't think that trying to ban S.DICE is a proper solution to anything. Higher fees are a solution, even if it does affect regular usage somewhat. As far as I know, majority of S.DICE transactions come from martingale bots which would be very much affected by higher fees. For the martingale strategy even small differences make it much more suicidal. It's exactly these kinds of spammy gambling transactions that should be deincentivized.
Transaction fees are just another form of a ban, one that is suicidal to Bitcoin in this scenario. February 25, 2013, 06:53:15 PM
I don't think that trying to ban S.DICE is a proper solution to anything. Higher fees are a solution, even if it does affect regular usage somewhat. As far as I know, majority of S.DICE transactions come from martingale bots which would be very much affected by higher fees. For the martingale strategy even small differences make it much more suicidal. It's exactly these kinds of spammy gambling transactions that should be deincentivized.
February 25, 2013, 06:46:20 PM
I believe S.DICE is one of the top 5 services in the Bitcoin economy and it has brought a massive amount of publicity and new users. I also think it's plain wrong to somehow say it's a "lesser service" because it is gambling. It's a service that has demand and adults should be free to play with their money if they want to.
Sure, that's fine with me (though I bet not the State of New York), but he can't justify attacking the network with "publicity" that only brings a few fools and government crackdown. There is no evidence there are any "massive" amounts of new users involved of any sort.The problem it causes for the blockchain can be solved by simply smoking it out with fees. I mean, services such as S.DICE will be hurt more than anything by higher tx fees, which would be a certainty if the block size max is kept untouched. They would be the first to consider an alternative way which doesn't use the blockchain.
Did you even read my post? The problem is that increasing the fees to "smoke it out" would kill Bitcoin adoption. Do you really want that? The reality is there already are alternative ways that don't use the blockchain; SD just refuses to do things efficiently.This is very off topic and I'm already tired that we have 100 threads in this forum about this same issue, but I'm starting to agree that we actually should smoke out certain services by not touching the block size max until it hurts them. I mean, let's see if users of S.DICE truly want to pay for it, or not.
They almost certainly will. Gamblers are psychologically inclined to tolerate a higher fee than rational transactors. February 25, 2013, 06:40:18 PM
I believe S.DICE is one of the top 5 services in the Bitcoin economy and it has brought a massive amount of publicity and new users. I also think it's plain wrong to somehow say it's a "lesser service" because it is gambling. It's a service that has demand and adults should be free to play with their money if they want to.
The problem it causes for the blockchain can be solved by simply smoking it out with fees. I mean, services such as S.DICE will be hurt more than anything by higher tx fees, which would be a certainty if the block size max is kept untouched. They would be the first to consider an alternative way which doesn't use the blockchain, or doesn't use the Bitcoin blockchain at least.
This is very off topic and I'm already tired that we have 100 threads in this forum about this same issue, but I'm starting to agree that we actually should smoke out certain services by not touching the block size max until it hurts them. I mean, let's see if users of S.DICE truly want to pay for it, or not.
This would most likely not be a problem for the rest of Bitcoin users since S.DICE should be much more vulnerable to higher fees than regular users. There are spammy methods (martingale bots) of playing S.DICE and a major amount of their transactions consist of these methods. The spammy methods would reduce if fees were increased, which is good. Bitcoin needs a fee structure that reduce all spammy uses of the blockchain, but still allows regular usage.
The problem it causes for the blockchain can be solved by simply smoking it out with fees. I mean, services such as S.DICE will be hurt more than anything by higher tx fees, which would be a certainty if the block size max is kept untouched. They would be the first to consider an alternative way which doesn't use the blockchain, or doesn't use the Bitcoin blockchain at least.
This is very off topic and I'm already tired that we have 100 threads in this forum about this same issue, but I'm starting to agree that we actually should smoke out certain services by not touching the block size max until it hurts them. I mean, let's see if users of S.DICE truly want to pay for it, or not.
This would most likely not be a problem for the rest of Bitcoin users since S.DICE should be much more vulnerable to higher fees than regular users. There are spammy methods (martingale bots) of playing S.DICE and a major amount of their transactions consist of these methods. The spammy methods would reduce if fees were increased, which is good. Bitcoin needs a fee structure that reduce all spammy uses of the blockchain, but still allows regular usage.
February 25, 2013, 06:29:58 PM
First, SD has paid more mining fees than everyone else in the world, combined.
Just because you pay the fine for vandalism, does not mean it's acceptable to vandalize, or that it covers the expense in cleaning up the mess you made.Even with the "standard" transaction fees, miners are still subsidizing transactions at their own (direct) expense in hopes of improving their (indirect) gains from the increased value of Bitcoin as adoption increases (which depends a large part on lower fees right now).
SatoshiDice achieves all this publicity, demonstrates the power of Bitcoin and provably fair gaming to the masses, and brings Bitcoin to the attention of casino operators around the world, and yet still people complain because it "makes too many transactions" and for their antagonism decide to block SD transactions from their mining pools
What little adoption it brings is from irrational gamblers and the casinos out to exploit them; these are not the kind of people who improve the value of Bitcoin at all, just make it more likely to be banned.
What it does do is flood the network with abusive "transactions" conveying more information than finances ("I bet x BTC", "you win", "you lose" are information), using more activity than any payment network today could handle (relative to actual usage). Other reasons aside, this alone would get your attack blocked by VISA et al. Bitcoin attempts to block this attack as well: even in the original paper, miners are expected to deal with flooding attacks. Obviously the original suggestion of using merely fees is not sufficient, since SatoshiDice uses social engineering to fool gamblers into paying 100% of the cost to bypass this anti-flood measure. While we could simply increase fees until the flood stops, the extent we would need to do so would effectively kill adoption of Bitcoin. Blocking SD directly is the only known viable method of Bitcoin surviving this attack.
Note that Bitcoin is a lot of things, but it is not meant to ever be more efficient than other processing networks like VISA. Centralized services are by nature more efficient, so that is unavoidable.
You refuse to stop flooding the network, and insist we deal with it ourselves. Blocking SD outright is how Bitcoin deals with this kind of attack. Deal with that.
Of course, the best way forward is for you to stop attacking Bitcoin. There is nothing inherent in SD's design that necessitates the flooding by any means. A similar service (that I would setup myself, if it weren't illegal) could be done very easily:
- Use compressed public keys for everything. There is no need to waste 2x the space for no gain by using uncompressed keys.
- When a user visits your site, prompt for a withdrawl/cashout address immediately, so there is no opportunity to lose bitcoins. This fixes your bug whereby SD is assuming the first input's previous destination happens to be a valid return address - this bug causes bitcoins to be lost in all cases it isn't true, and creates real security problems when Bitcoin implements post-quantum cryptography upgrades (currently, post-quantum crypto requires that addresses never be used more than once).
- After users provide their cashout address, give them a deposit address. They send however many bitcoins they want to gamble with.
- Display the gambling game(s). Let the user play as much as they want, with instant feedback. RageCoin has an example of just one way to have easier and instantly-verifiable provably fair gaming.
- When the user is done (leaves the site, clicks a button, or just stops doing anything for N minutes), send whatever balance is left to their cashout address.
Edit: And in case anyone thinks SD would somehow be less "popular" with these changes, note that they could very well support both ways of using it and find out for sure. (not that there's any doubt in my mind)
February 25, 2013, 05:41:04 PM
Those transactions are insanely inefficient— half of them are pure messaging and not really a monetary transaction— they make it much more costly to run a Bitcoin node— they're burning up our technical startup capital without adding new users to the bitcoin economy (or at least not many). The bitdust outputs they create will likely never be rational to spend and are rapidly inflating the UTXO set— unprunable data. Across the board they're bad they're bad for the ecosystem... and they're ever so easily blocked, basically a one line patch. So, even if it wasn't net-profitable to block them I'm sure some would.
SatoshiDice is "burning up your technical startup capital without adding new users to the bitcoin economy?" Are you serious?
First, SD has paid more mining fees than everyone else in the world, combined.
Second, I'll just leave these here...
http://calvinayre.com/2013/02/01/business/why-bitcoin-can-no-longer-be-ignored/
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-03/bitcoin-making-online-gambling-legal-in-the-u-dot-s-dot
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/02/06/171182974/is-online-gambling-legal-if-bitcoins-not-dollars-are-at-stake (was on national radio)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2013/01/22/bitcoin-casinos-release-2012-earnings/
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-01/23/bitcoin
http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/bitcoin-based-casino-rakes-in-over-500000-profit-in-six-months/
http://www.gambling911.com/gambling-news/bitcoin-casino-satoshidice-results-raise-eyebrows-online-gambling-sector-012313.html
http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/23/online-casino-makes-over-500k-skirting-laws-with-legally-gray-digital-currency-bitcoin/
SatoshiDice achieves all this publicity, demonstrates the power of Bitcoin and provably fair gaming to the masses, and brings Bitcoin to the attention of casino operators around the world, and yet still people complain because it "makes too many transactions" and for their antagonism decide to block SD transactions from their mining pools
February 21, 2013, 07:37:08 PM
Have you considered that maybe SatoshiDice is a government sponsored attack on Bitcoin ?
And they suckered thousands of people into buying shares in the company, thus attacking themselves!
February 21, 2013, 07:33:41 PM
Excuse my ignorance, but please explain "...updates the special block to a new parent whenever a new block is solver by the network)." All the subsequent blocks are not aware of this special block, how can the miner just broadcast it later and get the txwhenlost confirmed?
It was an awkward way to say that the block is disposed and a new block is created (on top of the best chain), containing the same transaction txwhenlost. Obviously the parent block will be different.
February 21, 2013, 07:28:52 PM
Excuse my ignorance, but please explain "...updates the special block to a new parent whenever a new block is solver by the network)." All the subsequent blocks are not aware of this special block, how can the miner just broadcast it later and get the txwhenlost confirmed?
February 21, 2013, 11:13:02 AM
Have you considered that maybe SatoshiDice is a government sponsored attack on Bitcoin ?
And they suckered thousands of people into buying shares in the company, thus attacking themselves!
February 21, 2013, 11:03:55 AM
Have you considered that maybe SatoshiDice is a government sponsored attack on Bitcoin ?
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