Topic: transaction processing policies (Read 2976 times)

I see pident.artefact2.com also shows who found the block. However, I do wonder how this is solved technically. Is it secure to trust this information?

Also, this information is not available for all blocks.

So I think more effort in this direction would be valuable for the community (although this service already looks pretty useful, thanks!)

Well, I don't think it is morally bad to exclude free transactions (whoever runs a service like a mining pool should be free to invent whatever resource management policy they find appropriate), but including them is probably a good investment into a prosperous bitcoin economy.

But miners should be able to verify that the pool they are mining for has a policy which they can agree to.

The information is all out there blockexplorer but also
http://pident.artefact2.com/block/00000000000009216ef6f30b0028ce4ca7ed65c33bcd833b7b6f41a9bb29d74c
is just that
Click on the block number and it shows you all sorts of good stuff. eg:
Generated BTC: 50.00852746 (includes transaction fees) for each block.

http://ozco.in will be shortly including these transaction fees in payments to miners and these amounts will be displayed on our "More Blocks" page for everyone to see.


The pool I run accepts fee free transactions - I would be a hypocrite using free transactions myself but excluding them from my pools blocks.

When looking more closely at the press releases so far, you will notice that the issues reported there are not related to bitcoin-specific things. They stem from long known issues (web security, desktop security etc.) impacting infrastructure used for bitcoin. As bitcoin is decentralized, they can only have limited effect, as they will only create FUD among a subset of (potential) bitcoin users.

People spreading FUD here on the forum are far more dangerous than yet another few bad press releases. So please consider this before continuing to do so.
Every community has to cope with freeloaders when exceeding a certain size. If bitcoin can really be damaged in a considerable way by the strain of freeloaders you describe, it will be better if it is found out now rather than later when the damage will be greater. This way, we can identify solutions for minimizing the impact on the community as a whole.

Moralizing won't help us here. Instead, it will help if we can actually see the effects you describe, rather than theorizing about them. This way, users will call for solutions, for example through peer pressure: When people are aware of the bad impact certain transaction fee policies have, they will ask for more transparency from pool operators. At some point, a pool operator won't be able to afford not to publish the blocks he creates because users want to protect their investment into bitcoin.
Then please elaborate on your argument. So far, I only found a rather negative hypothesis by you, together with an attempt to moralize thnigs in order to avoid facts to be created.

I actually think we do share the same fears when it comes to possible dangers for the bitcoin network, but I would rather see the community find out how far these are based on facts, and find solutions. This will enable the bitcoin network to become even more robust.

When Bitcoin is a self sustaining currency that isn't a few bad press releases from being destroyed.


Not in the short term, and that's the problem.  There is a benefit to gathering your profits in the short term to the detriment of the long term.  That's why it's rude and antisocial.  You're putting your own profit motive/greed ahead of what's best for the network as a whole.



I agree, it's coming, but it's not here yet... so my argument against it stands.

So what is the right time to let the free market loose (assuming we are really in the position to decide)??

A pool operator who drives transaction fees up cripples bitcoin, so he also cripples his own profit.


Rather than trying to stop the free market evolve, I think we should focus on exactly the points you are mentioning that are needed: clients should have maximum ability to decide freely. This is also a reason why I put up this thread in the first place. I would hope to improve the transparency of the current pool policies, so everyone can decide which approach he supports. I have enough trust in the bitcoin community's smartness to not abuse this freedom for wrecking the bitcoin network.

They may not be designed to hinder spamming, but they are used for that at the moment, and this use is also reflected in the vanilla client source. This situation won't change until enough people patch their clients in order to remove that limitation.
I'd say the bitcoin sources are rather straight-forward to understand, so if there is an interest in sophisticated transaction choosing rules, they will get implemented. Myself, I would enjoy experimenting with these things and thereby evolving the fee market, but I'm not currently in the position of running my own pool. After all, this would eat up much of the time I could put into development by forcing me to build it up and advertise it.
I think there is a very good reason to include foreign feeless transactions: doing so improves the value of the bitcoin network to users, which will ultimately facilitate a higher exchange rate when trading bitcoins. As mining rewards are high these days, a pool operator who plans long-term will probably be interested in increasing his net gain this way.

I think a somewhat "local" policy of processing feeless transactions is not so bad. Trying to create a global anti-spam policy has already led to the bitcoind defaults crippling micropayments. But a pool operator who processes feeless transactions from his miners has a bit more control - he could kick out those who actually spam, while letting senders of feeless transactions do their work.

On an ideal bitcoin network, I should be able to send a zero-fee one-satoshi transaction and have it processed some day, as long as I don't do so in order to flood the network.


Well, apparently we are already at this point, even though I'm also not convinced that fixing this somehow would increase spamminess. I made a tiny feeless test transaction, and it has been lying around unconfirmed for almost 3 days now.

Thanks for your support. However, I do wonder if there is any systematic way for finding out the block history of a pool. Maybe mining for them and tracing back the blocks of the payment they send out would work...?

It basically eliminates it as every share is worth the same amount (while proportional/scored shares are dependent on pool luck + size) of BTC.


In fact the current standard fee is "sub tenth"...

In the not too distant future it might not just take "awhile" but these transactions could hang in limbo forever. There are for example still some outstanding transactions from the beginning of may in the network, that noone touched yet. That is the real issue and concern of mine. It won't take long until EVERY transaction has to have at least a tiny fee associated with it to ever be integrated in the blockchain. This is also planned behaviour for the future, so there is NO way around having fees in the long run if you still want to have miners.

The current situation is a nice and shiny early-adopters world we're living in. However if the users now get used to 0 fees, they will (rightfully) demand this in the future too. This has to stop as fast as possible if you want to keep Bitcoin around in the future, or users will just flee to an "inflationcoin" alternative, that just pays miners constantly, but this way can keep transaction fees at 0 (since the inflation rate in this system then would be the "hidden" transaction fee). from a user's perspective that alternative system would still be 100% comparable to Bitcoin (as ~2% inflation per year is anyways standard in current economy) but "cheaper", since transactions will never need to require transaction fees.

How does SMPPS change your variance? 

Does the mainline client allow sub tenths fees?  I haven't looked in awhile.  Regardless, though, just because people are used to paying small fees does not mean it's right or good.  I'd argue, in fact, that we should be working towards NOT charging fees, or at least not REQUIRING fees as the default mode.  In fact, the current direction of Bitcoin is, in my opinion, the right way to go - fees are not required, but if you want them processed faster then pay a fee, the higher the fee the faster it gets processed.  Getting people used to paying for speed/enhanced features is what we should be working on, not getting them used to being gouged and nickle and dimed to death at every single turn.

I don't see any hate being generated for feeless transactions.  If we impress upon them that this is FREE, but may take awhile, if you want it faster pay a fee, then they will be fine with that.  On a personal level, I have some transactions that I don't care how long it takes to really get incorporated into the block chain and thus I resent having to pay a fee... however, if I need the funds confirmed RIGHT NOW,  I would be willing to pay a small fee for that privilege.  But I (would) highly resent being charged that fee even if I don't care if it takes several hours to show up in the chain.

They use SMPPS as payout system.

If you pay 0.00005 BTC for a 0.5 BTC transaction, that's a 10000th (or 0.01%) of the amount as fee. Compare this to the usual "xx cents + yy% per transaction" structure of Paypal.
Also people are used to payying small fees - if you advertise Bitcoin as being more secure than Paypal (no chargebacks) but with only half the fess I doubt they will be pissed.
If you market it currently as "nearly every transaction is FREE!" and then (I predict latest when the reward gets cut in half) pools will start to require fees people will be either pissed because now they have to pay or that it takes forever for their free transactions to be confirmed.

I'd even say having free transactions now for the masses is even WORSE for bitcoin than requiring by default a 0.0001 BTC fee for each transaction by default in the mainline client. Free transactions now are going to be a thing of the past/an impossibility in the future and will lead to even more hate against early adopters (which we all currently still are) who didn't just get half of all Bitcoins available distributed amongst themselves but also could transfer them for free!

Again: People accept fees in nearly every monetary transaction. Lowering them as an incentive to use BTC is ok, eliminating them temporarily jsut for the beginning is plainly stupid.

How do they have a low variance beyond hashrate? 


Yes, I agree that is what it's designed for and it's also stated in the documentation (or FAQ or wherever) that at the current stage, the fees are not really relevant.  My contention is they are, beyond not being relevant, a hindrance to the acceptance of Bitcoin.  If I, as a user, have to pay a fee to send a .05 BTC transaction, it hardly becomes better than Paypal.  As someone more involved in the Bitcoin community, I know it's better than Paypal, but Joe Average user is going to be pissed.


This is a cogent argument and I appreciate it.  However, what if Deepbit decides to change that policy?  Just because someone is willing to do the right thing at this time and process free transactions, it's ok for others to be leeches and build their policies and greed off of that largess?  Again, we get back to being just plain rude and greedy.  "Someone else is cleaning up the park, so we don't have to."

It's everyones job to keep the place clean;  Just because their are people walking through the park picking up trash doesn't mean it's ok to throw your trash on the ground.


We are not at the point where we should be letting the free market decide things, nor are we at the technological level where we can let the free market reign.  As you said, the getwork system is ugly and clients should be in control as to what they process and what they don't.  Pools should be a dumb conduit for that.  A pool operator deciding unilaterally whether or not to only accept non-free transactions is motivated by greed/profit.  I'm not sure how you can possibly spin that any other way - the only reason not to process free transactions (barring a spam attack) is because you want money for it and do not want to philanthropically support the infant BTC. 

That in and of itself is fine for end users, but I don't think pools should do that.  The thing is, most users don't understand the philosophical and technical underpinnings of a pool deciding whether or not to accept fees, so letting the free market decide is not really a viable option at this point.  Once there's a client (and pools) to support client decision on whether or not to process the transaction, then I think we will be ready to move on to choosing to support feeless transactions or not.  But until then or until Bitcoin gains much, much wider acceptance, not processing feeless transactions is anti-social and detrimental to the Bitcoin movement.

Eligius only pays out the 50 BTC generated, not transaction fees.

Compared to a lot of other pools, I do earn more though, since they are hopping proof and have one of the lowest variances possible.

Transaction fees are NOT designed to hinder spamming but to compensate miners (currently rather pools... as they usually don't pay them out). Every time you add a 1 kB feeless transaction, with ~20 000 nodes in the system this creates a need to transfer and store ~20 MB of data forever(!) + some CPU cycles to verify this transaction 20 000 times.

As long as deepbit for example anyways wants to keep free transactions, you can set YOUR accepted transactions to anything you like - they own ~50% of the network (give or take a bit) so the maximum delay of a free transaction would be anyways just 1 more block at most.

I think you just didn't read sufficiently through the Bitcoin ressources: transaction fees are designed(!) to be an open market and have competitive prices. The only problem right now is, that it's not really easy to include custom/complex rules on which transactions to accept and which not, as the current client is a mixture of a client for end users with a nice GUI and pool operators (with that ugly "getwork" system) at the same time. As soon as dedicated pool operator clients show up, I expect this to change. A lot!

Edit:
@btcboston:
Why exactly should any pool accept free transactions from non-miners?

Minimum transaction fee on Eligius is only 0.00004096 BTC per 512 bytes, which is really not so bad.  I agree with you that pools should be accepting free transactions right now, but, to say that it is based on greed is a bit of an exaggeration when they are willing to process transactions with very tiny fees.

Why?  Because it's the courteous thing to do, which I've already stated. 

You are just being an asshole by not processing feeless transactions, especially small transactions where .01 BTC is a significant portion of the transaction.  I have no doubt that's why you mine on Eligius, because it increases your profit.  So your greed is the motivating factor, not the advancement and acceptance of Bitcoin. 

Your claim that pool operators could include their own transactions for free is somewhat ridiculous in the face of 1.5 million difficulty, since it can take a long time to solve your own block, especially for the smaller pools.  And you betting that other operators would do the same for their colleagues is also somewhat ridiculous - each pool operator should somehow make custom additions to their block acceptance for every other pool out there?  Seriously?    You really think that's going to happen?

Again, not processing legitimate feeless is just rude and anti-social at this point in time.  When spamming becomes a serious problem you might have a case, but not right now.

Any pool can include it's own transactions in it's own blocks for free as it pleases. I bet other pool operators would do the same for their colleagues, so this point is really not valid. Why include transactions of non-miners for free, who do cost you storage space + processing time but just leech on your (and - since nearly everyone has the full uncompressed blockchain currently - actually EVERYONES) ressources doing so?!

In fact the reason that they require transaction fees for all their transactions (even though they are MUCH smaller than the official client charges!) is the main reason I mine on Eligius.

I send out feeless transactions a lot, especially when sending out payments from my pool to the miners.  Why would I want to not include free transactions when i'm taking advantage of them myself?  It's a) irresponsible, b) anti-social and c) just plain rude to skip free transactions as a pool operator, especially when the transactions you send out to pay your miners are sent out as free.  You're leeching off everyone else who is processing free transactions by doing that.

I would boycott a pool that did that, as a matter of fact.  If and when the time comes that there's a problem with free transactions causing a disruption, then you can revisit that, but until such time, doing that is just obnoxious and contrary to the whole community.

I think the possibility of doing free transactions adds to the value of the bitcoin economy. Ultimately, it might lead to better exchange rates when trading bitcoins, or have other favourable long-term effects for people using bitcoin. So I don't think it is all clear that having a transaction-fee-only policy is economic to do when creating blocks.

Well, my apologies if my posting was unclear. I'm just seeing that there is no complete consensus about how high transaction fees should be, how to handle dust spam etc. So I think this is something that should just evolve, by network participants trying out different settings, or recompiling their clients with different minimum limits. But this won't work if they just donate their computing power to pools without knowing what the pool owner does about transaction fees. Maybe we can get to a point where pool owners regularly advertise their transaction fee policies, and some diversity is created. Evolution of transaction fee policies is something that has to come, at least when the mining rewards are lowered, but I think it is already advantageous if we try out these mechanisms today.

I do not care about the transaction fees being shared with the pool participants or not. This will only become interesting when it is about more than 1% of the total block reward.

My pool is including many free transactions, usually limited to 50-100 Kb of them per block. I would like to keep TXes free as long as possible :)
Transactons with fee 0.01 or more are considered "non-free" and have higher priority.