Topic: Miners that refuse to include transactions are becoming a problem - page 5. (Read 16972 times)

Where do you get this garbage about exorbitant transaction fees?  A bit penny is exorbitant?  In what universe?

If you think the value and utility of Bitcoin is so useless why are you even here?


Srawman aside I never claimed I had.   You seem to have a very deep seated hatred of miners.

Another way to look at that: the reduction in the mandatory fee for large transactions was reduced too much, too quickly within the main client. While I personally pay those fees often enough, it hardly amounts to much. At the very least, the mandatory fee shouldn't be reduced again anytime soon (a $100 price for bitcoins would still make the 0.0005btc fee be only worth $0.05. At current prices I pay one-quarter of one cent per fee.)

Similarly, what is the default optional fee that the latest version of the standard client is set to upon install? If it's less than 0.01btc (currently $0.05 per tx,) perhaps raising this default optional fee to 0.01btc in the next release would be a good start at addressing the long-term low-fee problem, since it wouldn't change any aspect of the code or protocol, and could be reduced by users as needed.

Even if it defaults to 0.01btc already, maybe an additional notice could be displayed whenever the user reduces the optional fee, including text such as "Lowering this fee, while possible, is strongly discouraged.")

I can't see any practical objections to at least starting with that.

Actually... I think we should re-think this. Why not just let them make up transactions? It seems that if they include any transactions (maybe needing to add up to a minimum amount) that this specific problem is solved.

To make up a transaction, the following must be true:
1) You hold the private keys for the transaction or have a method of getting a transaction signed. (this would be death to 100% decentralized botnets (centralized botnets would just make a mining pool))
2) You know that the transaction isn't a double-spend. (so a decentralized botnet can't give the same private keys/pre-signed transactions out more than once without each computer holding a blockchain)

Honestly, I can't believe that this didn't occur to anyone else, and that we've just kept saying "the miner could make up transactions" to dismiss such an effective idea. By requiring at least one (reasonably sized) transaction that isn't confined to the block itself, we finally have a link to previous transactions that MUST be verified. If it isn't verified, your chances of creating invalid blocks rises significantly.

Okay I was only suspicious before, but now I'm nearly convinced that this issue has done much more to harm Bitcoin by bringing to the fore the absolute lunacy of some miners.

Some of you seem completely oblivious to the fact that nearly every Bitcoin you "earn" comes at the expense of the scant few actual producers and investors and participants in the real economy.  Half of you could fall off the face of the earth and the Bitcoin network would be no worse off.  In fact, the only reason this hasn't happened is because you are being subsidized by the non-negotiable inflation built into the protocol.  The abundance of zero-fee transactions should give you a hint as to the marginal market demand for mining services.

"Price deflation," give me a break.  That is entirely paid for by the few businesses willing to accept Bitcoins as payment for real goods and services.  And for the amount of time that Bitcoin has been in widespread public view, that number is dangerously low.  Accepting the premise that miners can earn rewards without processing a single transaction not only doesn't encourage new participants, it screams "stay away."  You are shooting yourselves in the feet by doing so.

For the record, I didn't call you "greedy".  I called you "short-sighted" and "extortionist".  If you were greedy, you would at least act in your own best interests.  Many of you can't even seem to do that.  Take a step back, do a little math and think about how many transaction fees you will be earning a year from now, if the average block still has only 50 transactions in it.  Then ask yourself why you are here arguing for higher transaction fees, which are ultimately insignificant compared to the block reward, and which will only serve to discourage growth in transactions between now and when the block reward goes away.

Did it never occur to you that the uncertainty caused by having 15% of the network not processing transactions is already hurting your profitability more than accepting a solution ever would?

Come on, get real.  What is the possible market for international transfers in an illiquid digital currency nobody uses?  Do you seriously think Bitcoin does anything that Western Union can't?  Do you think anyone will pay a premium to use a payment service that isn't even denominated in their local currency?  How long do you think Bitcoin will last if the only people using it are criminals and drug dealers willing to pay exorbitant transaction fees?

You haven't monopolized the secret directions to El Dorado like you seem to think you have.  You have simply drank the Kool-Aid, and are going to be completely blindsided when this desperate grasping for every last BTC ends up backfiring spectacularly...

If the top 10 transactions are 1 satoshi then that forces miners to include all tx with at least a 1 satoshi fee.  It creates a race to the bottom.  Smart users will keep fees as low as possible and encourage others users to do so.  "Look as long as nobody pays too much the miners are forced to include are freeloader txs".

Your insulting language is counterproductive.  You are aware that passing any breaking change on block validity rules will require support of a majority of us "greedy miners".  Also money supply growth isn't 30% anymore and after the subsidy drop it will be closer to 10%.  By the next subsidy break it will be ~4%.  Users have enjoyed price deflation due to the fact that the demand for currency has grown faster than the money supply.

They aren't becoming a problem. They are simply making transaction processing more valuable. When the incentive comes for them to process transactions, will be the day a higher fee is set across the board.

I see no issue. If the problem becomes bad enough, people will talk with their pocketbook.

Although, you could always coerce the miners into giving you free transactions. As for the consequences to Bitcoin as a whole in such a case, I'll leave that to you to figure out.

So what is the downside to this again?

This seems to solve the problem by setting a reasonable limit on miners' ability to extort the network for fees.  We really should consider a somewhat drastic solution.  Even though the mystery miner is likely a botnet, within a year or so we could easily see this same scenario play out with a large FPGA cluster that doesn't want to include transactions for whatever reason.  It isn't a problem that is going to just go away, or be solved any time soon by falling block rewards.  We're already subsidizing miners with 30% inflation;  it might as well go to those that at least process a few transactions.

Not true. All the building on top of an invalid block can't hide or change the fact that it's invalid and so would do no harm whatsoever. It would simply be wasted effort.

These botnets do increase the amount of hashing power an attacker would need to launch something like a 51% attack. They do increase the security of the network. And that's what the block reward is for. If the system is broken, it's because the transaction fee and volume aren't sufficient to justify the expense of including transactions in a block.

I wonder if we can detect these botnet nodes somehow, perhaps by the particular messages they send or don't send, and send them *invalid* blocks. It won't harm normal clients since they'll just ignore them. But the botnet nodes, lacking the block chain, will work on the wrong blocks more often than the right ones. This may do more harm than good in the long term though.

Several reasons.

1: The block reward may drop in half come 2013, however if the value of 1BTC doubles, then nothing has been lost. That leaves him fully secure to continue ignoring tx until at least 2017.

2: He isn't actually contributing to security, since he's only generating blocks off the previous hash without validating anything. That means if an attacker starts throwing down invalid blocks, our friendly botnet might blindly build right on top of them and give them a nice helping hand.


Also, it depends on which method is used. Gmaxwell's proposal would not affect legitimate miners in any way. Any proposal which excludes blocks that are "too empty" would have unintended consequences, but in the event of an attempted 51% empty-block DoS attack, the ability to screen empty or cheap blocks would severely limit the damage they could do.

We've been over this like 50 times =\.

The market purists on this forum should agree that the market is working exactly as it should.

The block award is for securing the network against a double spending attack, not for confirming transactions. Transaction fees are for confirming transactions.

The null miners are essentially specialized miners that are only in the business of security, and not in the business of security+confirmation like most other miners.

I don't think this is a huge problem. Even if the null miners had 50% of hashing power, average users would hardly notice any difference. Even if they had 90%, bitcoin would still work fine. It would just take longer for transactions to confirm. 

This problem is likely to disappear in future because:

a) The block award will drop
b) As bitcoin becomes more popular, there will be more transactions per block, and thus more fees to be collected
c) FPGAs and ASICs will marginalize the hashing power of botnets.
d) Most day-to-day transactions will be between trusted parties who don't care whether a transaction isn't confirmed yet, and who don't even broadcast their transactions most of the time.

Is it worth adding complexity to the bitcoin protocol, with possible unintended consequences, in order to solve a temporary problem?

Just wanted to say that this makes a lot of sense to me.
It still probably needs some detals, like only take into consideration transactions which are older than 1 minute or so (so that they have very high probability of having been globally-relayed) and perhaps not enforcing this rule if the total number of unconfirmed transactions (that are "supposed" to be in the next block) is too little. (This can happen due to a bug, or, what is more realistic, due to 2 blocks being found very short time apart (which can happen, it's all just probabilities)). So for example if there are only 5 transactions that are supposed to be included, don't enforce the rule, because in that case the outcome of the percentage calculation is biased too much by every single transaction (and thus much more prone to errors and can create unnecessary forks).

You also need to discourage the block if it has only transactions you don't know about, since otherwise the miner could make up transactions.

I'm not bothered by this rule from an economic perspective, but I'm not confident in the effectiveness of discouragement (due to bad incentives), and I'm uneasy about relying on transaction propagation in any way, since propagation is imperfect and will get worse with time. I prefer gmaxwell's proposal because it only relies on the block chain.

The goal is not to force any particular policy but just to avoid miners being lazy and not gathering any transactions at all. So long as they can't take the shortcut of not including any transactions at all, their self-interest will lead them to include fee-paying transactions.

So the rule could be this simple and this modest: If there are at least four transactions that are not free and have at least the standard fee that were not included in the previous block even though they could have been, discourage any block with just a coinbase transaction.

So you are never punished for not including a free transaction. And you are never punished for not getting a new work unit when you didn't have to anyway because a new block was found. But this will solve the problem of paid transactions backing up if multiple blocks are found by miners who refuse to include any transactions.

This is, IMO, the least onerous rule that would solve the problem.

It's not a strawman.  I'm just emphasizing that some minimum standard is reasonable.  I'm sure we can come up with a method that will work.

Rather than having a minimum bar, why not make it a sliding scale?  For example:  you must include at least 20% of the top-10-percentile-fees (either since the last block or sliding-window) transactions?  As always, -5 or so to accommodate latency etc.  That would give you a lot of latitude to cherry-pick.  In many circumstances (only a couple transactions with high fees available) you would even be able to mine a null block and have it accepted.

Edit:  Or rather than allowing a null block, we could mandate that every block include at least one transaction if there are at least 5 outstanding.  Is it an undue imposition to include one free transaction if there are absolutely none that meet your include policy?  That provides a very strong incentive to include fees, and completely solves the null-miner problem:  Mystery can mine a null block if he wants to - but only in the few seconds after the a previous block that cleared out all waiting transactions, during which a null block is reasonable by any standard.

Please don't use strawman to support your argument.

What if fee policy was 0.01 BTC?  Less than 10% of txs in last 20 blocks had a fee of 0.01 or higher.  Hell less than 1/3rd have a fee of any kind.    Thus a requirement to include 50% of txs mandates including free txs also.  Any fee policy no matter how low (even min 1 satoshi) would face exclusion.

So at least be honest with the ramifications. 

Yes, you will be orphaned if you set a "fee > 100BTC no exceptions" include policy.  It is not reasonable to demand that the network have no right to question your policy if you institute a bad one: the whole point is to stop people from excluding all txes.  We're trying to find a minimal method that won't affect any reasonable include policy, but it does create a requirement that you might have to do something.  A relay policy with no actual mandate is pointless.  As I said:  Checks and balances.

You're becoming a broken record.  Your point has been heard and is being taken into consideration.

The modification I was proposing wouldn't affect relaying so tx would be relayed to every node even my node would continue to relay it.The tx is valid so rejecting it is inappropriate I just don't want to mine it.

As far are mining it into a block.  If every single miner on the planet (and all new miners coming online) had a min fee rule with no exceptions higher than your fee then it would never enter a block.  However that is obviously unrealistic.  If 10% of miners had such a rule then 90% of network would still include it in the next block so your expected confirmation time would simply be 11 minutes vs 10 minutes.  If say 99% of network excluded it from the next block (due to insufficient fee) then your expected confirmation time would be 16 hours.  Obviously both of those numbers are expected confirmation time, the actual time would be subject to variance just like any confirmaiton time is.


The later.  My proposed change would only affect what tx go into the next block and only for those miners/pools which implement the patch.  Any valid tx would continued to be relayed.

What would happen if everyone did this and I send out a transaction tomorrow with no tithe to the system. Where does that transaction go? How would the user have any idea what has happened? How would they know if it still floating around out there, maybe waiting on a generous miner who has a long pro bono publico wait list, and that they don't need to resend it?

What if the fee requiring miners are in the minority but each of the 8 node connections that my client has just happens to have this fee rule? Again, does my transaction get lost in the nether? How would I get my transaction out to the miners who are willing to include my transaction? Would the nodes say "nope, fees too low on this transaction, into the round file it goes..." or would the nodes say "nope, fees too low on this transaction but maybe Bob down the street would be willing to help you out, I'll pass it on"?

That's similar to what Gavin and Revalin proposed, the downsides of which have been discussed at length .

Gmaxwell's proposal should achieve the same effect without the downsides of a threshold-based approach. The main advantage of an approach like yours is that if the bot owner finds a way to include verification without including current tx, he still gets shut out for non-cooperation.

I think if you were to do it that way, a much lower threshold would suffice. AFAIK our mystery miner only includes a single token tx in his blocks, or none. With ~80tx average per block, a 5% threshold would neatly wipe them out. At that rate, miners have little to complain about, and the likelihood of a fork is lower. At 50%, a pool might end up having an otherwise valid block excluded if they happen to charge on the high end of fees. At 5%, a pool charging enough to get excluded would not be providing anything extra to its users (if any).

So miners are required to include tx that don't meet their fee requirements?  If they don't they risk having the valid blocks not forwarded?