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Topic: Huge increase in satoshidice spam over the past day - page 5. (Read 8855 times)

sr. member
Activity: 476
Merit: 250
Tangible Cryptography LLC
SatoshiDice is the free market at work also. They chose to use the blockchain to make a game following the Bitcoin protocol and paying fees for it. What was your point again?

I agree.  The market is made up of suppliers (miners) and consumers (tx creators).   No reason to complain.   If you don't like their tx spam require higher fees.  If enough miners do it then their business model will need to change.

The current situation is like having an all you can eat buffet and complaining people are going back for seconds.

I think the point is a free market is made up of both parties.  If SD is free to spam the market then DB is free to ignore those txs.  One can be wrong without the other one being wrong.  Personally I think neither are.
hero member
Activity: 496
Merit: 500
SatoshiDice seems to be a great way for core devs to get a taste of what it's like to handle a volume like this when bitcoin network starts to scale up and think of the solutions in advance.

And what is the solution they came up with? Kill the volume maker!
Doesn't sound good to me...
Stop.  Thats not what I am suggesting, nor is this something that is being extensively discussed, I started this thread to see what the community would say in response. 
The goal is not to kill anyone or prevent them from using bitcoin for their use-case.  Read the thread please.

Sorry, but that's the impression I got because you also called them stupid and braindead.

From the quote below it's seems they are also suffering from the same issue you mentioned,
if "use transactions in a more conservative way" means avoiding multisend.
They are a young service and hopefully they will work this out.

I realize satoshidice is sometimes slow... but for the past few days I always had to wait at least five minutes before I even know if I won or not. Often times it's even longer.

Is this just me? Or that happens to others too?

Sorry, that was a database change I made.  I make it use transactions in a more conservative way which ended up being a good bit slower so it was having trouble keeping up with people's bets.  It should be much better now.  I really need to track some metrics of bet to result time so that this sort of issue is more obvious to us.
legendary
Activity: 1358
Merit: 1002
More than complainting about SatoshiDice people should be complainting about the biggest pool not using sendmany and only processing around 100 transactions each block, sometimes even less, which I wouldn't be too surprised if are comprised mostly of it's own transactions to pay miners, even when there are thousands of transactions on the memory pool.
That's the free market at work.  Deepbit can choose to confirm or not confirm whatever transactions it likes.  If you need your transactions to go through quickly, then send it with a fee.  If you are just trying to bring awareness to the issue, then that's probably a good thing - knowledge helps people make better decisions.

SatoshiDice is the free market at work also. They chose to use the blockchain to make a game following the Bitcoin protocol and paying fees for each and every transaction they send. What was your point again?

And, no, I'm not happy that I'll probably have to take out my bitcoin client from my main laptop and put it in it's own dedicated machine, but what must be done, must be done.
I will not trust you or anyone else to run a "trusted node".
sr. member
Activity: 476
Merit: 250
Tangible Cryptography LLC
That's the free market at work.  Deepbit can choose to confirm or not confirm whatever transactions it likes.  If you need your transactions to go through quickly, then send it with a fee.  If you are just trying to bring awareness to the issue, then that's probably a good thing - knowledge helps people make better decisions.

+1.  SD could even partner with DeepBit sending them all their tx and paying a monthly fee for priority service.   The market is wide open.  The days of every pool accepting every tx on every block is likely coming to an end but honestly I find it interesting.
hero member
Activity: 576
Merit: 514
My opinions about this so far:

- SatoshiDice is legitimate. It may not try its hardest to make the most efficient transactions, but you will always have clients who aren't perfect. SD just does what might happen in 2-3 years anyway, but by lots of different users. SD can use the system only within the given limits; if it would do something wrong, transactions would get rejected. Basically it boils down to the underlying protocol restrictions: spammers for example are really hated, but they operate fine within the SMTP-RFC.

- Someone mentioned "trusted nodes": that's what SolidCoin advertised so heavily. And what failed. Giving control to few nodes might blow everything up.

- Restricting the heavy users won't help either. That's similar to the ISP who advertises with "unlimited downloads" but later throttles you when you download >1GB/month.

What about changing the way the blockchain is stored? Instead of having everybody store the full chain, they could store only 1-2% of it. 50-100 users then would have the entire chain, and with tens of thousands of active users, there would still be hundreds of sources for each block.

Clients could join a swarm when connecting which sort of represents the entire chain. Although clients would only store fractions of it, the entire blockchain is always available. Pretty much like a Bittorrent swarm is still fully functional as long as every single block is at least on one seeder's machine. You'd only need a small index file (think of blockchain.torrent) which handles the checksums of blocks (note that I'm not talking about bitcoin-blocks, but data-blocks, eg 10MB chunks). Add an option to let users decide how many % they want to store and voila, someone can decide to provide a full copy.
legendary
Activity: 1400
Merit: 1005
More than complainting about SatoshiDice people should be complainting about the biggest pool not using sendmany and only processing around 100 transactions each block, sometimes even less, which I wouldn't be too surprised if are comprised mostly of it's own transactions to pay miners, even when there are thousands of transactions on the memory pool.
That's the free market at work.  Deepbit can choose to confirm or not confirm whatever transactions it likes.  If you need your transactions to go through quickly, then send it with a fee.  If you are just trying to bring awareness to the issue, then that's probably a good thing - knowledge helps people make better decisions.
legendary
Activity: 1358
Merit: 1002
More than complainting about SatoshiDice people should be complainting about the biggest pool not using sendmany and only processing around 100 transactions each block, sometimes even less, which I wouldn't be too surprised if they are comprised mostly of it's own transactions to pay miners, even when there are thousands of transactions on the memory pool.
hero member
Activity: 755
Merit: 515
So what's going to happen when BitInstant gets rapid bitcoin->cash conversion working and somebody gets the idea of making a mobile frontend to SatoshiDice that acts as a lightweight wallet and interface to BitInstant behind the scenes? How would something like that affect the Bitcoin network if it became popular?
If its done right and uses multisend, it would be a perfectly manageable load on the network.
legendary
Activity: 1400
Merit: 1013
So what's going to happen when BitInstant gets rapid bitcoin->cash conversion working and somebody gets the idea of making a mobile frontend to SatoshiDice that acts as a lightweight wallet and interface to BitInstant behind the scenes? How would something like that affect the Bitcoin network if it became popular?
hero member
Activity: 755
Merit: 515
SatoshiDice seems to be a great way for core devs to get a taste of what it's like to handle a volume like this when bitcoin network starts to scale up and think of the solutions in advance.

And what is the solution they came up with? Kill the volume maker!
Doesn't sound good to me...
Stop.  Thats not what I am suggesting, nor is this something that is being extensively discussed, I started this thread to see what the community would say in response. 
The goal is not to kill anyone or prevent them from using bitcoin for their use-case.  Read the thread please.
hero member
Activity: 496
Merit: 500
SatoshiDice seems to be a great way for core devs to get a taste of what it's like to handle a volume like this when bitcoin network starts to scale up and think of the solutions in advance.

And what is the solution they came up with? Kill the volume maker!
Doesn't sound good to me...
hero member
Activity: 555
Merit: 654
This should be a non-issue in the long term:  If the network can't handle 50k tx per day, Bitcoin was never meant to succeed.  The only reason it's such a big issue right now is because it's a single entity producing the volume -- and thus there's somewhere to point the finger when it was really our lack of preparation to handle it.
...
In my mind, the only reason this is an issue is because the community was not prepared to handle the rapid increase in size -- and it will work itself out once users/dev figures out the way to accommodate it.  There just may be some turbulence in the short-term.  


EXCELENT post etotheipi! At least there is some self-criticism in the community!

This is what I've been saying in so many posts: we are not prepared.

If just one single entity made such a mess, then think about 10 more satoshidices beginning to operate tomorrow.

That's why I designed MAVEPAY. I'n not saying that MAVEPAY is the only solution, but people should start accepting there is a scalability problem.




hero member
Activity: 784
Merit: 1000
0xFB0D8D1534241423
Why are you all so eager to get the network comprised of only "trusted nodes"(trusted by whom?) and "lightweight clients"?

Way to kill decentralization, IMO.
Exactly. What's that Satoshi quote? That governments are good at cutting off the heads of things like Napster? Well... how many trusted nodes are we talking about, who's going to protect their heads, and how do I apply to be a trusted node so that I can mess with the blockchain later on?
hero member
Activity: 755
Merit: 515
Yes except they DO store part of the chain AND they do verify against those parts.

Alone none of the nodes are full, but together they act as a network of full nodes.
You can't verify against part of the chain.  You can say "this transaction's signature is invalid" but you can't say "this transaction's input doesnt exist".  Also, even if you have a few full nodes to check for this case, they cant prove it unless they send the full chain...
hero member
Activity: 755
Merit: 515
Err... for the reason of punishing flooders? If you're relaying the DoS you're a flooder yourself too.
You are the one who insists it be configurable as to how much you forward (and I, mostly, agree with you).  You cant have it both ways or you end up punishing everyone and dropping connections.

But then the flooder just generates more addresses. What's the point?
As stated above, punishing high-traffic addresses by no means will remove the potential for the problem to occur.  The goal is really because people who do use one address usually dont care about confirmation times, so they can gladly still use them and some might.  Really its to make people think twice before designing their site in an entirely braindead way.

But it is avoiding these "trivial DDoS" I'm talking about. But doing so via download limits and all, not via fee policy.
Doing so via download limits removes the possibility of users using Bitcoin for some things that may be very desirable.  Forcing fees before forwarding transactions that we otherwise wouldnt forward at all allows those transactions to exist.

Regardless, they're making a legit use of the technology, not a DoS attack. Specially if they're paying for it.
a) they arent making a legitimate use.  Arguing that it works under the current rules is not a reason to not change the rules to make it not possible.
b) they aren't paying for it.  Paying miners does not help or help the high load it inflicts on end-users.
hero member
Activity: 815
Merit: 1000
Why are you all so eager to get the network comprised of only "trusted nodes"(trusted by whom?) and "lightweight clients"?

Way to kill decentralization, IMO.

I shall not be paying for your silence Wink
legendary
Activity: 1358
Merit: 1002
Why are you all so eager to get the network comprised of only "trusted nodes"(trusted by whom?) and "lightweight clients"?

Way to kill decentralization, IMO.
hero member
Activity: 815
Merit: 1000
If there is a block with an invalid tx someone reports it over the peer network. The bandwidth usage, even if you have send the documenting block, would be negligible as it would happen so rarely.
That is an interesting change to the trust model...But it is significantly easier to simply have a full node/SPV node distinction and have all full nodes do the checking.
The idea is to avoid the need for full nodes: I want a 1 tier network.

After re-reading the scalability wiki it seems you could split the block up in to a list of hashes.

This ALSO means you should be able to document an invalid tx with just a few hashes sent along with your report.

To get your own balance you query your peers as with torrents and if there's an update they send that block to you.
So...SPV clients after the Bloom filter change...
Yes except they DO store part of the chain AND they do verify against those parts.

Alone none of the nodes are full, but together they act as a network of full nodes.

To work you would need more than 8 peers/a smarter protocol, but that's hardly rocket science.
>8 outgoing connections is not really an option.
Alright my bad.

In that case do "peer switching" if all your 8 peers don't have what you need make them give you one of their peers that DOES.

That way ALL nodes could be storing/sending/verifying >>1% and still function as a full node network with the same safety.

EDIT: Miners would still need to build and send full blocks, however building said blocks could become outsourced to mining pool clients. (from the scalability wiki)
legendary
Activity: 1106
Merit: 1004
Flood defense against individual nodes doesn't really make sense and is just punishing that node for no reason.

Err... for the reason of punishing flooders? If you're relaying the DoS you're a flooder yourself too.

  The point is to protect against flood from particular addresses. 

But then the flooder just generates more addresses. What's the point?

Also note that it doesnt really effect the hard-coded fee policy which addresses radically different aspects of a tx's "badness".  That said, I do agree that hardcoded fee policy is bad, but its really there to prevent other trivial DDoSing, as most standard txes should never hit that.

But it is avoiding these "trivial DDoS" I'm talking about. But doing so via download limits and all, not via fee policy.

SatoshiDice isnt flooding the network because they have high volume, they are flooding the network because they refuse to use features like multisend which would keep their network load down, while still allowing them to have the same volume.

Regardless, they're making a legit use of the technology, not a DoS attack. Specially if they're paying for it.
legendary
Activity: 1106
Merit: 1004
"Normal" users should not be using bitcon-qt.
Well, it's the official client for one.

There's nothing "official" in Bitcoin, and the fact that you think there is shows an understanding issue.
Saying that bitcoin-qt is the "official Bitcoin client" is like saying Microsoft Outlook is the "official POP3 client" or that Firefox is the "official HTTP client".

Granted, it is the "reference implementation", the only one so far which fully implements the protocol, and as consequence, the one which actually defines it. That's different from being "official" though.

For two, the more people that stop using a "full" client, the fewer full client nodes we have, and the less secure the network is.

Network security is much more related to the amount of computing power behind mining than the amount of full nodes in the network.
It's unlikely that someone manages to DDoS or hack all full nodes at the same time, even if only solo-miners and pool operators were running full nodes.

And, please, understand: if bitcoin succeeds, it is just a matter of time until this happens (few full nodes). If that really makes Bitcoin less secure as you say, then you may say Bitcoin is not secure by design.
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