Topic: POLL: Allow dust transactions in Bitcoin? (5430 satoshis or less) (Read 5157 times)

I would say allow these transactions after bitcoin is valued at $1 million, not now.
These transactions have no real value and serve no real purpose.

that's actually also pretty good idea because sometimes a developer might need to test their software to see how it responds to very tiny payments, WITHOUT using testnet.

My vote is accept dust transaction with a higher fee.

Not by the protocol, but by all miners.

It would avoid problems with blockchain commercial spam too

If it ever becomes a pint of beer you can change your node settings to allow dust. By allowing worthless spam, you are actually decreasing the likely-hood that Bitcoin will be successful long term by increasing the cost to run a node and thereby reducing network security. There is literally no reason to accept dust.

Like DeathAndTaxes said, would you spend $0.49 cents to mail a penny? More accurately, would you spend $0.49 to mail a penny to a PO box that someone else has to pay a monthly fee for to keep just to hold your worthless penny for eternity on the hope that it might someday be worth at best $0.49?

I believe that having dust transactions is important for those that use faucets and makes it cheap to introduce new people to bitcoin. We technically don't even have enough to give 1 satoshi to everyone on earth.

Except we're having problems with mining centralization so miners no longer represent the community but instead a few rich men who can bribe the miners to get what they want.

Yeah ultimately, it is up to the miners on how they wish to handle those transactions.

This is something that is up to the miners, right? Everyone can choose for themselves what to accept/relay?

You're right of course, miners won't relay them. More importantly, where the hell did you go? I haven't seen you post here in months. Did you get fed up with Bitcoin or this forum?  What ever happened to Tangible Cryptography? You still in business?

I chose to allow and relay dust, I do accept it would create huge traffic and volume and possibly open up to satoshi attack but I have a good reason, Bitcoin will become $1m+ per coin making a satoshi worth trading! Dust now is a pint of beer in the future!

I think it could be a nice idea to allow these dust transacions in Bitcoin, because many people could need to send or receive a microtransaction.

it works with a fee of 0.0001  

Discus Fish included relayed it.

If the protocol allows us to choose whether we want to accept the transaction. If let's say there is no confirmation by the recipient then the amount should be returned back to the sender. Not sure if this is workable or considered a good solution but at least this will block spam.

That's a darn good find, my friend and it works:
https://blockchain.info/tx/3b557a4089c93b6d32adddf4fb7666833bfb22d8b3819baa163aba6a01bfdcac

That's much better than sending 0.00005430 at minimum.

That IBLT is an interesting concept and indeed has fantastic potential.

The only way the good old Bitcoin can survive is to change and evolve. The latter is hard without a hard fork. Many people will oppose a hard fork, especially if it would ruin ASIC mining. On the other hand, people would support a hard fork when they can keep their original wealth. This is where most of the altcoins went wrong --- they started to compete with Bitcoin totally. Instead, they should have made Bitcoin's private keys compatible with their coin. For example, the first block of a new altcoin should include all bitcoin addresses that have at least 0.0001 bitcoins. That's why I hate Ethereum and love Aethereum .

In theory, Bitcoin could remain the most dominant cryptocurrency if  it was willing to evolve at the cost of hurting ASIC miners. If Bitcoin decided to take such a radical step that to introduce Peercoin's hybrid proof of work/stake model then I would support it for the greater good. I also think that the Bitcoin's block chain itself could be improved.

For example, instead of dragging all blocks with the network starting from the first block the network should gradually forget the oldest blocks. If there are any unspent outputs in the block that is about to be forgotten then they could be included in the next block in some special way like refreshing the outputs. After 1000 blocks the about-to-be-deleted block would be actually deleted.

So, unless Bitcoin people are willing to take such radical steps to improve the network I will remain pessimistic about Bitcoin. If, however, the community accepts such steps then my optimism will grow. Knowing how things work in this world I would say that by now too much money and interests are tied in this whole Bitcoin thing and we will suffer from serious consequences of being conservative about the changes to the protocol.

I have made some parts of my post bold. I didn't explain these ideas in detail to keep it short. However, if you have more (technical) questions about my ideas then feel free to ask.

Interesting post, I have always found your opinions rational and informed.

When I first found out about Bitcoin I was super-excited about its potential. Super-excitement which lasted about two weeks until I learned about the limits on throughput and storage. I have remained just "excited" about it since, tempered with the knowledge that so much needs to be done. Although, a huge amount has been done, Bitcoin Core 0.9 is vastly superior to Satoshi's 0.1, and soon we will see 0.10 with headers-first for rapid node bootstrapping and synchronization. Greg Maxwell uses the term "low hanging fruit" to describe the range of known technical changes which can improve Bitcoin generally and its volume handling. Also, IBLT has fantastic potential, including reducing the 10 minute lag on blockchain consensus to nearly real-time, by enforcing a high degree of consensus on unconfirmed transactions. Bitcoin rides Moore's Law like a surfer on a wave.

Most of the alts have the luxury of low transaction volume which is basically investors buying, selling and shuffling their wallets. All of them will struggle under serious real-world user volumes (if they ever get it).

I remain very optimistic that Bitcoin can develop to become a significant factor in the world economy.

did a tx of 0.00005429 with fee of 0.01

it is included into a block.

EDIT:

dust is new defined below 546 satoshis but it depends

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/a0417b8cc840ff6f49b4fb1f8ceef54f8e3d0df1/src/primitives/transaction.h#L145

I have read the posts again but they didn't tell me anything that I already didn't know. However, somehow something made me change my mind about it and I now support the idea of having this dust threshold. It doesn't solve the problem but it wins us some time. There will be a day when the block chain is simply so big that only a few nodes could host it. The conflict here is that some people want Bitcoin to be forever and others (such as myself) simply acknowledge the fact that Bitcoin will become unsustainable and something else will take its place. If we look at the situation from the point of view that Bitcoin is going to die anyway then dust transactions should be allowed. If we want to push Bitcoin's death as far into the future as possible then we should not allow dust transactions. That's why I wouldn't allow dust transaction --- to buy us more time.

My speculation is that Bitcoin will die because of its technical limitations (ASIC mining sucks and the block chain is growing too fast, also current TPS is not sustainable in the long term). Peercoin's block chain is just 400 MiB and it will remain in that magnitude for long time due to the fact how they have solved the transaction fee problem. Thus, Peercoin is the ultimate store of value and not Bitcoin (said jokingly but then followed by a serious look in the eye). Also, Peercoin has Proof of Stake mining, so anyone could have an ASIC (hint: PoS ASIC is a Raspberry Pi). For everyday use cryptocurrency, Sunny King's community has developed the NuBits project and thanks to NuShares the shareholders can vote on all sorts of things --- the aspect Bitcoin community obviously lacks. Essentially all network related decisions should be voted on and votes be weighted by the share of coins the voter owns. For example, if I have 1 bitcoin, then it gives me 1 vote on any Bitcoin related development decision. As a NuShares shareholder I can vote for issues like that (to allow or disallow dust transactions and what not).

Finally, should the NuBits block chain grow too large the shareholders could just come together and vote how to solve the problem. One solution is resetting the block chain and then redistributing the nubits to their owners. This is the future and in the future block chain's size is not an issue. Also, Open Transactions should solve much of the block chain's size problems. Right now I feel bitcoin development decisions are made by some privileged people who are obviously prone to corruption.

Accepting and relaying them right now would be a mistake.
On the other hand doing so in the future is necessary.

To be fair, the blockchain can only be validated if tx's aren't pruned.  So the full blockchain must still exist with *some* miners/users, otherwise the whole security of the system collapses.  So while OP_RETURN outputs will be pruned by most nodes, they will still exist and be able to be verified.  All users must have the option to download and verify the entire blockchain from the beginning, otherwise the system isn't secure.  And in order for users to be able to do that, it has to always be available somewhere.