What benefit does leaving my client on provide to the network?

Peter Todd

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Quote from: kjj on January 10, 2013, 01:22:43 PM

Quote from: jl2012 on January 10, 2013, 12:12:42 PM

So it's effectively destroying some bitcoins.

Correct. This is one of the many places where bitcoins can be destroyed, and have been destroyed in the past. I'm not aware of any ongoing issues with this.

Sort of. Bitcoin's can be "destroyed" by making them unspendable, but this example is unique in that it is one of two ways that that it causes the total number of Bitcoins in existence, spendable or not, to be less than what it could be. Since this can happen with a block with no other transactions, the Bitcoins are essentially never created in the first place.

The other way is the duplicate transaction bug, where the satoshi client assumed that it was impossible to create two transactions with the same transaction hash. As it turns out that's not true, and thus it's possible to overwrite a transaction, destroying the first one, which means that as measured by the set of unspent transaction outputs, the coins no longer exist. This has happened on the main chain: the coinbase of block 91812 is duplicated by 91842 leaving 50 less BTC spendable. BIP30 fixes this problem, so without an actual hash collision this this will not be possible any more soon.

Edit: Fixed link

kjj

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Quote from: jl2012 on January 10, 2013, 12:12:42 PM

So it's effectively destroying some bitcoins.

Correct. This is one of the many places where bitcoins can be destroyed, and have been destroyed in the past. I'm not aware of any ongoing issues with this.

jl2012

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Quote from: kjj on January 10, 2013, 11:35:42 AM

Quote from: jl2012 on January 10, 2013, 11:22:58 AM

Quote from: kjj on January 04, 2013, 11:40:30 PM

Quote from: Third Way on January 04, 2013, 10:21:19 PM

You're way more knowledgeable than me, so I gotta ask. How do transaction fees reach the dedicated miners?

Each block is allowed a single transaction without an input, which the miner normally directs to a key they know, effectively their reward for finding that block. The size of that magic transaction is limited to not more than the sum of the fees (which are just the differences between the outputs and inputs of each individual transaction) plus the subsidy.

Do you mean a miner may produce a valid block with total reward less than fee+basic_reward?

Yes, and a few of them are in the block chain.

From main.cpp, CBlock::ConnectBlock() :

Code:

if (vtx[0].GetValueOut() > GetBlockValue(pindex->nHeight, nFees))
return false;

Also in main.cpp, GetBlockValue() is a simple function:

Code:

int64 static GetBlockValue(int nHeight, int64 nFees)
{
int64 nSubsidy = 50 * COIN;

// Subsidy is cut in half every 210000 blocks, which will occur approximately every 4 years
nSubsidy >>= (nHeight / 210000);

return nSubsidy + nFees;
}

So it's effectively destroying some bitcoins.

kjj

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Quote from: jl2012 on January 10, 2013, 11:22:58 AM

Quote from: kjj on January 04, 2013, 11:40:30 PM

Quote from: Third Way on January 04, 2013, 10:21:19 PM

You're way more knowledgeable than me, so I gotta ask. How do transaction fees reach the dedicated miners?

Each block is allowed a single transaction without an input, which the miner normally directs to a key they know, effectively their reward for finding that block. The size of that magic transaction is limited to not more than the sum of the fees (which are just the differences between the outputs and inputs of each individual transaction) plus the subsidy.

Do you mean a miner may produce a valid block with total reward less than fee+basic_reward?

Yes, and a few of them are in the block chain.

From main.cpp, CBlock::ConnectBlock() :

Code:

if (vtx[0].GetValueOut() > GetBlockValue(pindex->nHeight, nFees))
return false;

Also in main.cpp, GetBlockValue() is a simple function:

Code:

int64 static GetBlockValue(int nHeight, int64 nFees)
{
int64 nSubsidy = 50 * COIN;

// Subsidy is cut in half every 210000 blocks, which will occur approximately every 4 years
nSubsidy >>= (nHeight / 210000);

return nSubsidy + nFees;
}

jl2012

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Activity: 1792

Merit: 1111

Quote from: kjj on January 04, 2013, 11:40:30 PM

Quote from: Third Way on January 04, 2013, 10:21:19 PM

You're way more knowledgeable than me, so I gotta ask. How do transaction fees reach the dedicated miners?

Each block is allowed a single transaction without an input, which the miner normally directs to a key they know, effectively their reward for finding that block. The size of that magic transaction is limited to not more than the sum of the fees (which are just the differences between the outputs and inputs of each individual transaction) plus the subsidy.

Do you mean a miner may produce a valid block with total reward less than fee+basic_reward?

niko

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There is more to Bitcoin than bitcoins.

Quote from: Third Way on January 02, 2013, 02:25:57 AM

If I leave my pc on and the client running, besides using up electricity, qui bono?

What benefit do I provide others, and, cans I see how many people are on the network also?>

If you are curious how many peers your client is connected to, mouse over the middle icon in the lower right corner (connection bars) - you will be able to see the count:

If number of connections is stuck at eight for more than several hours, you may have a system then does not allow incoming connections. Try going to Settings>Options>Network and choose "map port using UPnP". Restart the client, see how it goes. A general consensus is that running an honest node like this helps the network.

kjj

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Quote from: Third Way on January 04, 2013, 10:21:19 PM

You're way more knowledgeable than me, so I gotta ask. How do transaction fees reach the dedicated miners?

Each block is allowed a single transaction without an input, which the miner normally directs to a key they know, effectively their reward for finding that block. The size of that magic transaction is limited to not more than the sum of the fees (which are just the differences between the outputs and inputs of each individual transaction) plus the subsidy.

Third Way

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You're way more knowledgeable than me, so I gotta ask. How do transaction fees reach the dedicated miners?

Darktongue

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indeed if you are speaking to me. I've looked at this at length. my findings aee it could be something worth offering users in the sence of downloading the block chain to new nodes abd or a node that's all of a sudden decided to pop back in after being offline for months. The transaction end is so nill that no.. in the case of paying for security it would be pointless.

you have a slew of services that require a working node in order to operate. such ass hotwallets, online wallets, the exchanges, the crypto stock exchanges etc. so in thinking ot would ever be tottaly in need of payoffs for security... no.. but bandwidth yes, that might help some of ya that suffer the choke hold of isp throttle.

Third Way

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tp garnish btc? You, mean like getting some of that transaction fee gold?

Darktongue

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Activity: 574

Merit: 250

Yeah what they said.... It would however be nice tp garnish some BTC from it. atleast.I've always thought that. even if a Bitcoin was given weekly. ofcourse the problem then would be everyone would throw a client on a cheap vps abd pump.my solution for this would be to register nodes. but then you have the privacy argument.

Third Way

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Merit: 100

Thanks guys.

CIYAM

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Ian Knowles - CIYAM Lead Developer

The benefit to the network is the propagation of transactions (if few people kept a client running then the network could be much more easily attacked).

Understand that when it is not processing a newly announced block the client uses very little CPU or I/O (so the *cost* is negligible) and in upcoming versions there will be improvements made to the new block processing which will reduce those moments (roughly every 10 minutes) of poorer responsiveness you may experience with your UI (depending upon hardware).

Third Way

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Activity: 238

Merit: 100

If I leave my pc on and the client running, besides using up electricity, qui bono?

What benefit do I provide others, and, cans I see how many people are on the network also?>

Topic: What benefit does leaving my client on provide to the network? (Read 1466 times)