I can't wrap my head around why so many people are hating on Satoshi Dice.
What if there were some African business helping to educate or feed starving kids in Africa and it had a business model that produced a huge quantity of transactions, would you still be against it?
I really think these anti-Satoshi Dice people are elitists who think that because gambling is stupid in their minds that nobody should be able to.
As if the Bitcoin Protocol gives a shit about what the transactions are used for.
And Luke-Jr says SD is breaking the rules. Really? I was under the impression that any transactions that broke the rules were immediately rejected by the bitcoin protocol. I mean, it looks like they're playing by the rules to me.
Seriously, if Bitcoin can't handle Satoshi Dice just throw in the towel right now, because I have some news for you. In the future, when Bitcoin is the GLOBAL MONETARY STANDARD, 95% of all transactions are likely to be gambling, sex, and drug related.
Those seem to be things that people value highly in life. Just because your puritan asses can't handle it doesn't mean we can't.
I, for one, LOVE that Satoshi Dice is flooding the blockchain.
Frankly, if some charity spammed the blockchain in the same way, I'd have the same stance.
Since early on I believed that the system as a whole won't scale if some fee scheme isn't enforced. We're delaying this but I don't see any good reason why. There are many ways the blockchain can be attacked because of this policy and SD is just one. I can start a number of bots passing small amounts among a big number of addresses and have a ridiculous number of transactions that would do nothing but bloating the blockchain. Nothing at all prevents this other than the waste of bandwidth.
The whole system is designed so you don't need to trust anyone. Yet we just rely on the fact that people are not going to spam the blockchain to the point that the hard limit of 1MB per block isn't enough.
Nothing personal against SD, it simply shouldn't exist if it cannot deal with higher transaction fees. I just want a system that scales and doesn't need changing every other year to delay the fact that one day fees will have to be put in place, both to finance mining and to prevent reckless spamming of the blockchain.
If we're introducing a serious change we might as well deal with it in a more generic way now. Today is SD tomorrow it will be something else, malicious or not.
The fact that the "standard" client takes dogs years to sync with the blockchain already hinders adoption by the common folk substantially, and this is not helping.
Let's see what the miners "vote". I believe both blocking SD and increasing blocksize arbitrarily are short term solutions. We speculate that either of these will give us years. I don't think we should rely on that.
Leaving things alone is also an interesting option although one that will likely hurt Bitcoin's image. Eventually fees will set themselves (at the expense of some people losing coins). But this is exactly the same we're relying on to account for the block reward halving, when the moment comes that it doesn't justify mining on its own.
At this rate every transaction with a low enough fee will be a gamble itself.
TL;DR: enforce fees already. Agree a scheme for the minimum fee and put it in place. I believe the best would be a fee proportional to the size in KB of the transaction. Block size costs. Zillions of people are using real storage and bandwidth. If you think KB is too complicated for the common folk maybe make it 0.1% or something like that.
