Topic: WARNING! Bitcoin will soon block small transaction outputs - page 15. (Read 58538 times)

Close.

It is true that miners choose which transactions get into blocks.

However, every client chooses what to relay, or not.

OK. And comparing it with drilling holes in people's heads was totally coherent, relevant and "respectful".


I hope you're right on the last phrase.
And yes, in the end of the day significant miners get to tell what's accepted or not. So why embedding this particular policy in the default behavior anyway? (the particular dust-non-standard one, not the config options, which are obviously welcome)

Yes and No, Yes there should be a high limit to prevent spam,
 but also there should be a lower limit on the amount of satoshis you could send to a EMPTY address,
 a spammer can use have infinite number of empty addresses to bloat the blockchain with 1 satoshi transactions
 but he can only have so many addresses with a balance in it!

thus forbid transactions that send less than x satoshis to a address with 0 satoshis.

If this transactions have multiple outputs, just look the one's that are empty and send the amount back as change.
This will make everyone want to have at least x btc in his/her address and not spamming the address space with almost empty addreses.

After reading all 15 pages of this stuff.. It basically boils down to this.

There was a magic number in the code for the transaction fees, so if a user of the bitcoind software wanted to change this, one had to get the source, edit main.h find the magic constant, change it, compile, install and use the newly compiled binary.

Sooo rather then that.

It was made an run time configurable thing. A NEW magic number was chosen. OMG! You're censoring transactions!! Nazi! Fork the code!!

I mean see for yourself:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2577/files

(hint the red lines are removed and the green lines are added)

For example:
---
-    // To limit dust spam, require MIN_TX_FEE/MIN_RELAY_TX_FEE if any output is less than 0.01
+    // To limit dust spam, require base fee if any output is less than 0.01
---

Notice the change from a CONSTANT to a variable?

Geeze...

This only changes the default behavior of pools so they block dust transactions. Some pools already block dust transactions and will continue to do so. Others haven't been blocking dust transactions and will accept them.

But others will just do whatever default behavior the devs set.

That's your - and mine too - opinion.
Some people apparently see the blockchain as useful for data storage, or for message sending, whatever. Simply trying to censor them is dumb. It's the typical bureaucratic response to a perceived "problem": ban it!

The clever response is to imagine how could Bitcoin profit from it. And I can see no better way than to make them pay for such unconventional usage.


Don't be ridiculous (or troll harder). There's consent in Bitcoin usage. Apart from botnets and alike, nobody forces you to install Bitcoin in your computer.


They're not "imposed".

And yeah, that's part of the "game": the remuneration is diluted in this lottery-like thing popularly called mining. That's known in advance. You know you'll only get the fees of a transaction if you get to produce the block that contains it. As long as the remuneration you collect (inflation + fee) pays for the overall effort and costs you need to bear, you should be fine.
Although in general I'm for the internationalization of costs, you shouldn't get overly paranoid there. Sometimes it's more expensive to internalize a cost than to bear the free-rider. For example, have you ever seen a residential building trying to charge its inhabitants according to the amount of times they took the elevator?
(By the way, if UTXO ever becomes so huge that smaller miners can't bear to store it entirely - I honestly doubt it - they can choose to drop some transactions that they believe will never be spent. At the worst, some of these transactions get spent and these miners won't be able to fully validate the block in which they get included - if they get included by someone-, pretty much like SPV nodes. But they'll still be able to validate and mine all others, more "interesting" transactions. Another alternative would be to store these txs in slower and cheaper media, since they don't expect to access it. Anyway, I really doubt UTXO will ever get that big so this is likely a non-issue)


Great, at least people can safely opt-out. I still think it should be an opt-in though.


By deciding which use cases are desirable and which are not, and attempting to censor those considered undesirable. That's a judgement of value.

I insist: banning like this is dumb. Charging for it is more reasonable, and much more use-case-neutral.


I wouldn't call that "discouraging", I'd call that censoring them on bitcoind. Discouraging would be to make them pay.


It is not against their consent (botnets excluded, of course).

how is the any different than all miners using the standard client changing the minimum transaction size accepted to 5430 satoshis?

if it's identical, why haven't they done it already? why would a patch be necessary to implement the change? why not make a forum post with the suggestion?

People, i have a solution should look something like this:

Forbid transaction that includes output less than x for a output address with an actuall amount of less than y.

Where x is 100 times less than the transaction fee and y 100 times more than the transaction fee.
And,
the transaction fee IS the average of the transaction fee included in the last 4380 blocks.(1 month)
with a minimum hardcoded that will change, but could be 0.0001 for transactions of less than 0.01 btc amount (at the moment, but that last number could be 0.01% of the average transaction size, rounded downwards. according to blockchain.info average transaction size is 13.4btc; so you will have to pay a 0.000134 min fee for any transaction of less than 0.00134 / or for every output of less than 0.00134)

so for example if the currently average transaction is fee is 0.00054
you cannot send less than 0.0000054 to an address with less than 0.054 (it will bounce back as change?)

this will:
1- Encourage the consolidation of addresses for people that have little amounts of coins and many addreses.
2- Not prevent people from making satoshi-transactions (they will pay a fee but they will have to have some balance in the receiving address)
3- Not bloat the blockchain
4- Help in the eventually cleanup of the blockchain: then after an x period, we can cleanup all addresses with less than 100 times the transaction fee safely.(i'm not sure if this last one is possible, but we could alow the sending for free of this satoshis to a address with a minimum balance)

That should deal with the bloated blockchain problem...
people with small amounts of satoshis, and that care enought, can still recover them by sending some btc (over 0.01) to the address and then send it it back or by  alowing the sending for free of satoshis only if they leave the address with 0 balane and are send to a address with a minimum balance.

TL,DR:
Encourage consolidation of addreses, forbid sending satoshis to an empty address, allow sending satoshis (if paying fee) to an address with balance, helping cleanup of blockchain (addresess with 0 balance should be pruned)

And for the people complaining about the size of the blockchain, a miner/pool making 100$ a day cannot spend 100$ on a 1tb harddisk per year?

Actually, an improvement on the last suggestion.

Determine an acceptable (given technology) rate of growth of the total set of unspent outputs. Every 2 weeks, adjust the number of (new unspent outputs created - previous unspent outputs spent) allowed per block, based on how closely the maximum rate of growth is being tracked.

This makes the size of all unspent outputs a resource that is subject to an economic feedback loop, just as we already have (in theory) with the total size of each block. That minimizes transaction fees without ruling out legitimate transactions that look like dust (micropayments).

Miners could pay users to spend lots of dust outputs, since it allows them to include more unspent outputs (which they can charge for) in their block.

I guess this might have to happen if you want to keep the blockchain from getting spammed with useless transactions.
If the limit can be raised it can also be lowered, right?

When you have a communal asset like the blockchain it can lead to a tragedy of the commons situation unless you make services cover the cost of their transactions. Otherwise its like building roads and infrastructure funded by the taxpayer but the housing developers take all the profits.

tldr a land tax is a fair way to do things.

My experience says that temporary fixes stay forever.

That's exactly what Gavin referred to it as.

Not that it will affect me but this is absolutely not the right way to go about this. This has to be a temporary fix until they figure out what to do with the massive blockchain.

I need to update my suggestion. I have been told on IRC that the real problem is considered to be that unspent transaction outputs have to be stored in every fully validing node's memory. As opposed to the problem being total block chain size.

So my new suggestion is: Set a safe upper limit on the number of transaction outputs per block. Blocks with more outputs would be invalid and rejected by the network.

Advantages: Miners would optimize such that you need to pay a higher fee if you take up more of the unspent outputs in that block. Now, we let economic feedback kick in and we address the problem head on, rather than waiting for it to bite us as bitcoin usage grows and limiting dust transactions is not enough, since it only indirectly solves the problem.

Actually, you could do _both_ - set a safe upper limit on the block size to deal with storage issues and a safe upper limit on unspent outputs per block, too. Then you'd be totally safe.

Because some time in the future 1 BTC just might be worth $1,000,000.00 (i.e. 1 satoshi = 1 cent).
However, Bitcoin will not get to this truly excellent state if it is suffocated in infancy with transactions which existing fiat systems deem too stupid to bother with.


Exactly! Can anyone detail any previous fiat transaction they had for an amount < 1 cent?

This is a configurable variable. If valuation is so high 1 Satoshi is a non-negligible amount, there won't be spam at all and this variable could be set to 0.