Topic: How to give btc users no transaction fees. - page 4. (Read 1167 times)

That has nothing to do with spam.

The biggest challenge is determining what transaction is spam.

ok guys thanks for all the comments I could see that having no transaction fees seems very problematic to many of you. the point that got repeated was the spamming issue as a reason for not allowing free transactions. And many of you didn't like the idea to punish spammers financially, arguing how would that even be possible.

Well I don't have all the answers but punishing users of the network is not a novel idea. Ethereum does it to stakers if they go offline. They get punished financially.

Heck, the dude I saw pay $37 to transfer $200 worth of btc, that kind of seemed like a punishment.

So dont worry it's ok to punish people. It's happening as we speak. Now before we go and say something like "but they opted in to get punished". Well, when someone abuses network resources they are kind of asking for punishment. So I wouldn't shed much of a tear if it happened lol. So yeah, free transactions that would be great. Punish the spammers, that would be fine. Just give me free transactions even if it's only one or two a month.

The biggest challenge is figuring out how to go about punishing them. i think we need vitalik for that.

And that is good, because not one government decides about the currency's policy, but a community which is conscious about their autonomy. If you read about the Euro you mentioned, you'll continuously observe their persistence to keep the price stable. It is very justified for a fiat currency to lose its value over time; the number of people in these countries increases.

So, to counter-argue,

• They don't print 21,000,000 euros and then destroy the European Central Bank, nor do they set a fixed amount of euros to be printed every 10 minutes.
• They're not unable to control their currency in case of a liquidity trap or price instability.

Hyperinflation is one extremity. Bitcoin is the other. Both of them damage the economy. Sorry for asking this, but do you really imagine a world where an uncontrolled deflationary currency prevails? Where each person will transact using LN and everyone will suddenly become happy they're not victims of inflation?

Small and stable inflation rates do good to the economy; if you know that €1 will worth less in the (far) future you will spend it. You won't rather keep it, because you'll lose your purchasing power over time. This tendency to spend your money results to an intense money circulation which is obviously economically healthier. Now imagine having Bitcoin which is generally considered a “fiat replacer”. Why would I want to spend my money if it'll surely worth more in the future?

Anyway, that's the Dev & Tech section and I wrongly chose to continue further the discussion. If you want to reply, quote me here.

There are dozens of countries which do not control their own currency, either because they use a different country's currency altogether, or because their currency is pegged to someone else's currency. There are currency unions, such as the Euro and the CFA Franc, in which many countries share a currency and none can control it directly. All these countries have functioning economies, including some of the biggest economies in the world.

Because currencies spiraling in to hyperinflation forcing average people to lose their purchasing power and end up in poverty is working so well?

It is a currency; what it can't be in my opinion is a reserve currency used by ever person in a society. In other words, it can't replace the current financial system; the “fiat”. Simply, because it can't be controlled by the government, which is required for a proper functionality of the economy.

The technology of Bitcoin is indeed something relatively new, but deflationary currencies like gold coins were a thing thousands of years ago and with the today's world, they'd fail miserably. Inflation is sometimes required due to the increase of population. The more the people, the worse the economy.

Just imagine of a world where the main currency of the societies is deflationary not controlled by the government... Complete fuckin' chaos...

Terrible idea. Bitcoin is no longer fungible.

Even worse idea. Bitcoin is no longer trustless, decentralized, secure, or censorship resistant.

I'll quite gladly pay a few sats per transaction to not destroy Bitcoin as we know it, thanks.

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And bitcoin is a new currency which isn't issued by a government. You can't say bitcoin can't be a currency because every currency is government issued when bitcoin is the first that isn't. It is proving that statement wrong time and time again.

Probably answered fully by the users above; no censorship should happen on the network. Much less one that is decided through arbitrary criteria and risk affecting certain users as a collateral.

I appreciate the brainstorming and the ideas that you've proposed. However, I find that it really isn't anywhere near the most pressing issues, or an issue at all for that matter that would justify additional strain on the network nodes, and being subjected to red tapes during the implementation, by the miners, mainly. Paying a fee for transactions is just fine; if users are complaining about high fees, then well too bad. Going by the proposal, then they would be waiting for hours or days to make any transaction. I'll very much rather pay $10 and get it over and done with. You'll probably run into the problem with larger botnets and specialized computing arrays offering services for the PoW as dictated in your proposal eitherways.

There is no such thing as no fees. If you are going to have PoW as a substitute, then you are paying for the fees in the form of additional strain on your CPU and electrical costs. It would have to be more expensive than paying the fees as you are also putting a strain on the rest of the network, for making them validating the transaction's PoW. This will probably never happen in Bitcoin, but feel free to try it as an altcoin.

What mechanisms would be in place to prevent me and my friends to put you on that blacklist simply because I don't like you or because I am a jerk? Who decides who goes on the blacklist and who doesn't? Is it like a democratic voting system? How would you prevent that from becoming a popularity contest where those powerful enough could influence the opinions of others to make decisions that favor them?

You are proposing a system that would have a backdoor that turns Bitcoin into a custodial service where individual users aren't in full control of their money because it can be taken away from them. 

The problem with "spam" is that it is a matter of perspective. These transactions aren't breaking any consensus rules, not even standard rules. We call them "spam" just because they have certain attributes that we dislike. Any kind of restriction will consequently limit the protocol which is not a good idea.

Spamming isn't necessarily in the mempool only. One could spam by having their transactions included into blocks. What those folks do with the fulfilling of 547 sats is clearly spamming.

Spamming won't be prevented by blacklisting addresses. A network attacker could use temporary burning addresses for each transaction, as a result for you to still keep those, but in your blacklist. Also, how will you differentiate a regular address from a spamming one? In the transaction I linked you, the spammer funded both their and others' people addresses. Should they be blacklisted too?

I'll answer you very simply:  The nodes can't punish anyone; especially financially. In order for debiting their Bitcoin balance, they'd have to somehow provide a signature from the attacker's address, otherwise the whole purpose of this system where we sign digitally with our unique private keys corrupts. They can't sign and thus, they can't detract any amounts.

Well, every society we've been so far required a government to work properly, so yes it was issued by it. As I said, currency equals politics.

No kidding! I owned this stock once and they did some type of stock split and I ended up with nothing except a few bucks cash in my account and no shares!

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when you first brought up the issue of spam, i thought there's 2 ways to deal with spammers on the network in my "free transaction fee" utopia.

#1) If you are able to identify spamming bitcoin addresses, then you punish them by placing them on a blacklist that all miners keep and share just like they share other things. An address could stay on the blacklist for an agreed upon amount of time, say 6 months or 1 year. Whatever.

#2) If you are able to identify spamming bitcoin addresses, you punish them financially. How that would be done is a good question but it would involve debiting their bitcoin balance.

As you alluded to, the idea of having to pay expensive fees served as a deterrant to spammers.

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And such stability will be reached as and when we reach significant adoption. But if no one ever adopts it as a currency, then we will never get there. Someone has to be an early adopter.

Only because every currency we've had so far has been government issued. Bitcoin is something new.

And as I explained above, I don't really care what the merchants choose to do. It is none of my business. I want to use bitcoin as a currency, so I will continue to use bitcoin as a currency.

The thing you saw in the movie is an economic term called “barter”. People simply exchange goods & services with no mediums such as money. This is how people started transacting before the very first appearance of money. But, I wouldn't say that I could somehow compare it with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is indeed money/medium of exchange/currency; don't get me wrong. I'm just not in agreement that it can work in a global manner, where every state adopts it as their main currency. In other words, I don't expect the lightning network to ever “prevail” in the world. The way I see it is that the majority of its users will never stop behaving speculatively about it, or at best, it could be considered as the new digital gold from each country. But, 'til there.

If you watched the movie Borat, you might remember the scene where he offers an antique dealer a bag of pubic hair as a method of payment for breaking items in his shop. It's obviously a mockery, but imagine if there was a market for quality pubic hair. That would make it a payment method as well so long there are people who are willing to trade goods and services for it. But the majority won't be thinking how much something is worth in terms of pubic hair. It would be wonderful if one day Bitcoin could become such an economy where you won't have to use fiat as a comparison. I doubt it, but we will know more in 20-30 years.   

Well, he justifies it as following:

Look, it isn't bad to want financial freedom or deflation over your currency. It is perfectly acknowledged to want avoidance of a currency whose value decreases over time by an entity. It is also understandable to not want handing over your custody of your money to a third-party. But, you should also see this skeptically instead of credulously.

In the last centuries, economists concluded that: Currency = Politics. A state can't operate if they're unable to control the currency that is being used. The fact that they may harm the economy with their bubbles doesn't mean that we have to turn this obsoletely. Dreaming of a world where Bitcoin prevails sounds pretty anarchistic; we aren't in the P&S section and it's aimless to discuss about such case, but I personally disagree.

I believe in Bitcoin, but I don't see it as a currency brought to solve the “corrupted” modern financial system. Since no state controls it, it'll probably remain a speculating asset that is considered very useful. Just like gold, it isn't used for exchanging goods, but it could be used perfectly as a store of value.

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Well, actually, it will never stop being used. There will always be people willing to accept it as a payment method. As long as few accept it, it can be used as a store of value. Most of the gold isn't been used for jewelry & technological stuff either; the majority is kept by governments.

Correct.
It depends. The time taken to generate that is dependent on your own PC/phone which ends up as kind of a discriminatory policy; only those who have a sufficiently powerful computers can generate it quickly and those who don't have that can take hours or days. Going by this, then those people are very likely to not want to waste their time to try to do this and would rather pay $1 - $5 to just immediately send their transaction.
Nope. Bitcoin dealt with it just fine because fees became so expensive. A few years ago, the spam was artificially generated and it wasn't necessarily expensive, considering the costs of Bitcoin at that time. Botnets are fairly suitable for spamming the network, if you introduce a PoW which is fast on CPUs and going by the concept.

Hard fork will be rejected, because even soft fork was, see: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/representing-fractional-satoshis-in-difficulty-like-format-5330102

Technically it is possible (as mentioned in the topic above), for example we could have one byte for moving decimal dot and seven bytes for amounts. Seven bytes is enough to cover all 21 million BTC today with eight decimal places, so when going to smaller units, they should still be expressed as 64-bit numbers. If anyone would need more precision, then two outputs will cover what 128-bit number could, but I think there will be almost no cases where more than one output will be needed. Moving decimal dot by three places would mean 21k BTC with millisatoshi precision, and that could mean using "03" byte prefix instead of "00", going to 100 subunits could be simply done by using "5c" prefix. That format would allow us to use up to "ff" prefix with 255+8, so 263 decimal places! Of course such amounts will be rejected on mempool level in the same way as dust amounts are rejected today.

Maybe you don't, but the merchants certainly do. If their product or service is priced $100, they will want the equivalent in bitcoin at the time you make that purchase. One day, that item might be 0.002 BTC, the other day it can be 0.001 BTC or 0.003 BTC. I have rarely come across a shop selling its gear for a fixed amount in bitcoin. If I noticed that I am paying 50% more or less than I did the last time, I would be curious to find out why. And that's where you have to go back to the fiat value of the item to find out if it just got more expensive/cheaper, or has the value of Bitcoin changed.

We usually don't take seriously any amounts that are under the dust. Currently, you can't broadcast a transaction that funds less than 547 sats. This isn't an arbitrary number choice. It is calculated to be cents in terms of USD. At the moment, 547 sats are equal with 22 cents. Back in 2011, the dust amount was 0.01 BTC, but the exchange rate was $1-$5.

In order for us to assume that one satoshi is valuable enough to not consider it a dust amount, it should worth around 1-20 cents. That makes 1 BTC = 1-20 million dollars. I think we're fine with eight sub-units for the next 4-8 years.  

If you cut an extra piece for each slice of pizza, you don't have two pizzas. You just cut your pizza into two pieces.

I assume you're referring to the current state of things.


Why stop at 12? Heck why not go all the way to 100 subunits? Then we're talking!

I mean you could guarantee you would never run out of bitcoin even though there's a 21 million max supply! Just rename 1 bitcoin to a milli-bitcoin and you've just turned 21 million of them into 21 billion.

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