Topic: Miners that refuse to include transactions are becoming a problem - page 11. (Read 16953 times)

you forgot maybe solo-miner also closes his rigs at this point.

Not right now, I'm not asking for an increase tomorrow. But in around 9 months, miners will have their payday cut by half. I'm not going to do the "good thing for Bitcoin" if I'm stuck paying from my pocket because of low fees. And it will be the same for a bunch of miners there, if they can't profit, they close the rigs. What happen if they close their rigs? Well, solominer is going to have a bigger % of the network and because of the drop of miners, blocks will take a longer time to solve, slowing even more the flow of transactions.

I don't see this situation as a problem, I see this as a wake-up call. It's going to take that long before we see software that manage included transactions in a block, or "optimal" pools that include only transactions with fees.

Personally I actually prefer mining at a pool that includes transactions (even if they don't pay the fees out to miners).

Including transactions is important for the Bitcoin network to be utilized by merchants and users, and that usage is important for the future of Bitcoin.
Right now with 50BTC block reward (or even with 25BTC) transfer fees would need to be immensely high to compete with block rewards. Too high to ensure the use of the BTC network in its early stage. As the number of transfers increase and the block rewards decrease, transfer fees will become more viable. But that requires a high network utilization with a large volume of transactions.

While I don't advocate free transactions (any fee right now however small is better than zero, as it habituates the concept of charging TX fees), including transactions in mining operations is a really easy and cheap way for a miner to show support for Bitcoin. And if you want to see Bitcoin as a future currency that support is certainly worthwhile.

or those users could simply include fees and increase the economic incentive for miners to process them promptly.

If fees were high and the miner was still excluding them I would be inclined to agree.  Still I don't think "mystery" actions are affecting Bitcoin users in any meaningful way.

1 confirm time has increased from 10 minutes to 11.5 minutes but most users look at 6 confirm time.  That has increased from 60 minutes to 61.5 minutes.  A 2.5% slowdown and well within the normal variance of confirmations so that an uninformed users wouldn't even notice tx being "slower".

So I agree there is a tragedy of commons effect but as long as the # of miners excluding all tx remains a minority it is unlikely to have any meaningful effect.

Incorrect.  Including transactions creates incentives for bitcoin users to use the network (faster transactions).  Slower transactions discourage users from using the network.  This is why deepbit includes as many transactions as it can, and doesn't really worry about fees too much.  Deepbit wants to create incentives for bitcoin use.

Too many no-tx blocks, and users will drift away, causing the value of each bitcoin to drop.

Thus, in the short term, no-tx blocks may make money for the botnetter, but in the long run it will make their (and yours) bitcoins worth less.

The value of bitcoin lies in the strength of the network, and the number of users.

I'd also say that more fees also would encourage more honest miners to ramp up their hashing power, diminishing this guy's %.

There is a fixed cost (in terms of software, complexity, bugs, troubleshooting, etc), for including ANY transaction.  The aggregate transaction fees are so beyond worthless (a few pennies per block) that it doesn't make any economical sense to include any transactions.  Including only paying transactions doesn't improve that dynamic.  Including only paying transactions may lead to more paying transactions but that is an unknown and indirect benefit.

If transaction fees were higher then there may be interest.  At a minimum the miner may need to consider it either now or in the future.  Today he is pulling down ~$250 per block.  However say difficulty rises, the reward falls, and there is a crash on the market.  That might make a block only worth $100.   Now $100 is great unless you have gotten use to months and months of $250 per block.  While realistic transaction fees wouldn't bring him back to $250 maybe they boost it to $100 vs $105.  If $5 enough?  I am not sure but it might be.

This miner has some cost.  Even as a botnet (if he is a botnet) he has opportunity cost.  Fees create an economic incentive to include transactions.  No economic incentive exists now.  Having a few fees with a token amount doesn't change that.

The avg block has about 80 tx.  Even at 0.02 BTC each that is 1.6 BTC.  When block reward falls to 25 and extra 1.6 BTC is significant.  If transaction volume increases 50% over the next year if avg fee was 0.02 BTC that would be ~ 10% less income by excluding fees.

Is 10% enough to change his method of mining?  Who knows but 0.3% certainly isn't.

Some short-sighted miners here it seems...

The real Bitcoin economy would likely not handle a huge increase in transaction fees very well.  Enforcing the minimum would probably be fine.  But doubling or tripling it would likely cause pain.  And even that would get nowhere near the current block reward.

It's not even clear that this miner would include transactions if the fees were higher.  Right now he isn't including the transactions with fees.  He's including zero transactions.  No one knows the reason for this.

Your electric bill is being covered by the block reward.  If you want fees to go up in order to cover this cost, the reward would likely have to come down significantly in order to meet halfway.  Otherwise, the (miniscule) real economy would be hugely affected, and price could plummet.

Be careful what you ask for.

Transactions fees are completely ridiculous right now. I mean, the objective of fees is to cover the cost of a service. I can't talk for other people, but right now, fees are surely not covering my electricity bills.

Currently, a ton of people are shooting transactions left and right for free. I paid from my pocket those computers with this electricity, I took the time and the risk to provide this service, and I should give you a free ride on my service? Bitcoin generation is a temporary measure for the birth of the network, and we should not depend on it. I find it insulting when people act like transactions should be free, and that we, miners, should do the good(aka get screwed) thing and paying from our pocket so you can move your Bitcoins without any fees.

Those who are not including fees are the ones harming the network right now. I hope more miners does the same thing and force people to add more fees to their transactions.

It depends how much profit there is to be had vs the effort needed for this guy to upgrade his architecture and do things properly. It may be that now he has whatever-it-is set up and running, he doesn't care any more and it'd take a lot of missed profit for him to start caring about it. If Bitcoin reaches a point where it's incredibly expensive to use because of misaligned mining incentives it'll just end up useless as a currency.

I really only see three possibilities here:

1) Botnet and for scalability/whatever reasons they are not including transactions. Solution: investigate and get the owner arrested, if possible.

2) Custom hardware buildout. Friendly miner. Might not realize or care that he's harming the network by producing empty blocks, or not understand how to integrate transactions properly. Talking to them might help.

3) Custom hardware buildout. Knows what he is doing, does not care about overall network harm, does not care about incremental profit unless it's really large. Purely mercenary/profit motivated. Might be encouraged to upgrade his software if MtGox refused to do business with them until fixed. Otherwise just has to be tolerated, modulo something like Gregs protocol-level change proposal.

At any rate, there's little point discussing it further until somebody has contacted the ISP of the IPs in question and asked them to look into it.

If the confirmation times ever become a problem, people will just start paying more in transaction fees, and the whole thing will balance itself out.
It's in the design.

This is an interesting proposal. This is how a merchant would decide where to send transactions in other current clearing systems. If it can be done, it'd lead to competition and diversity among pools, and wouldn't that add to the overall network security?

It might create some competition in wallet/PoS systems as well - pools or their resellers might put out transaction software to directly push TXs through their pool (or a network of syndicated pools, etc) - having wallets that only relay to specific clearinghouses (pools) could open up additional fraud detection/protection services, etc.

I think whoever is doing this is brilliant.

There's been concern for a long time that the bitcoin network will eventually weaken due to pitiful transaction fees providing no incentive for new/continued mining.

Not only has this zero-tx miner forced this issue to the fore, he has also provided an incentive for all of us to do, over time, what needs to be done to alleviate that concern.

Begin bumping up our transaction fees.

It's doubtful that small bumps in our fees will quickly end zero-tx mining. But it's also doubtful zero-tx mining is going to cause serious problems in the near future. But over time, it begins to matter.

As our transaction fees go up, not only will we be incentivizing new miners (strengthening the network and lowering the % of hashing power belonging to the zero-tx miners) but, eventually, the zero-tx miners (surely a handful of miners already did this) will begin to start processing transaction fees just because the lost profit would make it stupid not too.

And yes, with a big enough transaction fee reward per block, even a zero-tx mining botnet (which we don't know it is) will switch. And the halving of the block generation reward will only hasten that.

Looks like the simplest, easiest, and ideal solution is for us to do what needed to be done anyway.

Well played.

i don't think anything needs to be done or changed... we're already heading towards a partial fix in december, then continual adjustments to 'economic incentives' after that.

Thanks MM

It's not an issue now, but better to think ahead.
Miners and pools need to start publishing a schedule of minimum fees for transactions they will accept, and I guess their relay IPs.

Similar to the problems discussed in
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=51712.0;all

Why not put in a requirement of at least 1 valid transaction for a block to be valid?  If there are no pending transactions then there is a bigger problem happening.  You would just have to be very clear on what is a valid transaction to prevent penny spamming and such.

Pay high transaction fees, such as 25% of transaction. If fees are higher than block rewards, the transactions will be excluded only by fool. Problem solved!

+100

I don't always agree with you but on this particular issue I agree one hundred percent. This is not a "critical problem" but it is still an outrage. The current 15% of "freeleech" is still not that much but I'm confident that people will start voicing their opinions on this a lot more loudly if this percentage increases.

DeathAndTaxes is partially right, it's not complete freeleech. But other than that I don't agree with him.

So what was all this nonsense ...


So botnets which play by your "rules" are good?
Also what if this isn't a botnet?  What if it is just a large hashing entity?  So botnets playing by your rules > someone operating under the protocol but not following yoru rules?

The entity (botnet or not) IS improving security of the network.  Network isn't degraded and economic incentive will increase as transaction fees become more important.  To call 1 tx blocks "wasted work" should a deep misunderstanding of how Bitcoin works.

My concern with botnets isn't that they're botnets.

I'm concerned about two things:  they are both a) making money without doing the job they were paid to do (improve the network), and b) actually degrading the network while they do it.

I object to (a) not because it's a botnet (as you mention we don't even know if that's the case), but because they're not doing their job.  I object to (b) for obvious reasons.

We should fix the economic incentives so that miners have to do the job we're paying them to do instead of just collecting money for wasted work.