Bitcoin Forum

Let's see the power of the free-market flex its muscle and boycott an upgrade.

I think this will actually be a good experiment. It will show the world that we aren't being led by the nose by a few devs.

Don't get me wrong, I have all the respect in the world for the devs, Gavin included.

But this is not a popular fix. I think it's safe to say the large majority of Bitcoiners DO NOT want to block microtransactions.

Let's show the devs who's boss and refuse to upgrade to 0.8.2. unless the "patch" is removed.

Agreed, that's the point of bitcoin, so we can say f-off if we don't agree with what they think.

Its democracy, not dictatorship on how this shit is.

What is the dev's reasoning for blocking microtransactions? Is it to avoid people spamming the blockchain?

Yes.

If you want the debate over the reasoning or efficacy of the "patch" I recommend this link:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=196138.0

This is a thread for rallying boycotters who have made up their minds that this "patch" is junk and want to stick with the 0.8.1 client.

From what i've read, what your saying is that 0.8.2. is going to not allow micro transactions? What defines a micro transaction?
Bitcoin was designed to be divisible by 8 decimal places, If we are removing some of those decimals we are undermining the entire structure of bitcoin!

I can fully understand and agree that a transaction of .00000001 should be blocked though

Gavin has an ego and it needs to be under control, he is doing interviews now instead of fixing the blockchain bloat the correct way, not thru censorship of transactions. WELCOME TO BITCOIN BANKING!

You mean who?  Gavin.  Gavin now decides how we spend our Bitcoins.

Op make a poll!

This is sad in so many ways. To sum it up :

*1. One guy is deciding stuff. Backed by thedev group; not very decentralized.

*2. No alternatives to resist this.

*3. Bitcoin no longer equals 100mil satoshis! only 00000 !!!

*4. Goes against the ideology of the original paper by Satoshi which clearly states that btc is created for small transactions.

*5. I believe value of btc will rise. at 184+ you wont be able to pay in pennies. At 1842+ not in tens ofpennies. At 18416+ not in dollars. [I believe btc can rise upto this value]

*6. The sum of 54.3uBTC was chosen based on 'current value in dollars' it seems. Disappointing! Why are we comparing to fiat? We aim to move away from it.

Practically this is a change in the protocol and the way bitcoin works.

You can very easily resist this. That's what this topic is all about. Simply refuse to "upgrade" to 0.8.2.

The problem being... If miners upgrade to 0.8.2 then they won't even see your transaction.

It's not a protocol rule and miners are free to include transactions with outputs smaller. The change causes miners not include transactions with outputs which are a small fraction of the fee amount they have configured to treat as zero for the purpose of priority. They can change the setting and the network doesn't mind. It's a default, not a rule.

This is expected to reduce the problem of people creating data storage transactions which are uneconomical (or impossible) to redeem, but shouldn't effect actual financial transactions (even if the value of Bitcoin goes through the roof— as people will adjust the fee-treated-as-zero as that happens, and the defaults will be updated as time goes on, the network isn't require to be consistent as— again— it's not a protocol rule).

IIRC, Satoshi himself put in the first rule against very small transactions— making the node behavior to only mine or relay if a fee of 0.01 or greater was provided for transactions without any outputs smaller than 0.01 in order to stop dust flooding attacks. Because fees of 0.01 became rather large they were subsequently lowered to 0.0005 and now 0.0001 but a single fee is being abused to cram many megabytes of child porn website directories and other such junk in unspendable txoutputs. Requiring larger outputs is hopefully less intrusive than requiring the same value as a larger fee.

in a few months/years time when bitcoin is $1000 each then the minimal purchase you can make is just over 5c

so imagine
companies that want to do penny per click advertising cant use bitcoin
all transaction amounts would be rounded up to 10c increments to avoid losing profit. so a 75c chewing gum becomes 80c
this is the same as the governments getting rid of coins and only using whole pounds/dollar notes.

so i too say boycott the upgrade

they are being payed to fuck up the chain and bitcoin

Right.

So adjust the fees!! That is why the mechanism of fees was put in place cause it's adjustable.

Yes in particular people putting data onto the blockchain encoded as transactions: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=191039.0

There isn't any way to block that yet other than making it more expensive.

There is, the alternative is LTC, it's designed for micro-transactions that BTC chain can't handle. Like I said a year ago, LTC will be a transactional currency, while BTC will be a reserve currency (no tiny transactions allowed at all). LTC is a great supplement for BTC.

Unless the blockchain size is truly unlimited, which is impossible, someone is always going to get their transactions blocked.

The demand side of supply and demand for blockchain space is unlimited. You can always use it to timestamp data at least, so why not timestamp everything you can get your hands on if transactions are really cheap?

We need to find a balance between cheap transactions and decentralization. I believe 1MB is fine for the forseeable future, but other people think differently.

Has nobody read this thread?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=191425.0;all (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=191425.0;all)


If that's the direction the reference client is going then I consider this to be a positive change.

Thats not correct. This isn't a protocol rule. As miners shift down the fee value they consider to be 0 for priority purposes it shifts this threshold down too.

The word censorship loses meaning if you erroneously apply it to everything you don't like.

People can create txoutputs which cost more in fees to spend than they provide in bitcoins. This results in an increase in the perpetual unprunable data and the working set size of full nodes, and people use these outputs to also force all bitcoin users to carry around non-bitcoin data.  Making the default behavior to not mine the creation of new outputs that can't be economically spent directly addresses the issue of outputs which are uneconomical to spend.

People are demanding that the fees be _decreased_ while the non-bitcoin junk data storage is _increasing_ under the current fees.  This is the same general mechanism and it's also adjustable.

What the change does is makes it so that you can't pay a single 0.0001 fee and create a ton of 0.00000001 outputs.  The base fee was 0.0005btc/KB in 0.8.1 and 0.8.2 _lowers_ the base fee to 0.0001BTC/kb but refuses to mine transactions which create outputs which are so small that they'd be uneconomical to spend considering the miner's configured minimum-fee-to-not-treat-as-zero.


Uh. You are so thoroughly confused I don't know where to start.

(1) The change doesn't block anything.  Your "CENSORSHIP" here is crying wolf. It changes the default mining behavior to not include some transactions which are very likely to be abusive non-financial transactions, but it's just a default and its adjustable. It doesn't make them not able to be included. You've been told this multiple times. You've acknowledged that you understand that it's a configurable default, so are you intentionally telling lies now?

(2) There are VERY many transaction kinds which are inhibited in exactly the same way— in fact, unlike this most of them can't be permitted without modifying the source code. (Search for 'bitcoin standard transactions')

No censorship means I want to send 0.00000001 BTC to someone, if I am using the 0.8.2 Client then I can't. That is censorship. Or that by default your making it so miners are towards what you guys think is best. Instead of trying to figure out how to maybe make the blockchain smaller or use a different database, you just go "Easy fix is to block these transactions" Well that is just sad, that satoshi had faith in Gavin and he is letting all of us down. Now you claim he is making a market, but shouldn't the miners be doing that on there own, Gavin should have no hands on with that unless it is a bug fix. You all need to re-read the papers, cause your killing bitcoins AS WE KNOW IT.

As I mentioned, there are tons of transactions you already cannot easily make. For example, you currently can't easily send 1e-8 to someone without including a fee which is 50,000 times larger than the amount you are sending. You cannot easily make a payment which requires 2 keys out of 20 to redeem.  You cannot easily make a payment that adds 5 kilobytes of extra "message" data in a transaction. You cannot easily send a txout with value 0 zero to someone... etc. All of these things are non-standard transactions.  The protocol rules permit them, so miners can add them— but you have to find a miner willing to modify their software to do it.  Whats new here is an additional kind "you can't easily use a transaction which creates txouts which are small relative to the amount miners treat as zero", which can be freely overridden by miners changing that amount.

You're misunderstanding. This doesn't inhibit the _spending_ of small outputs, it inhibits the creating of them.

The wallet software already avoided creating them because they'd trigger fees higher than the amount being received as change.

You can still do it, but instead of having to pay 50,000 times the amount in fees— you have to find a miner willing to do it or mine the block yourself (with p2pool if you want to pool).... this is no worse than all the other kinds non-standard transactions that I listed, which you happily ignored. Instead of paying an enormous amount in fees, you can instead just add that to the amount you are paying. It's silly to force you to give funds away from miners as a proxy for trying to get you to not create outputs that aren't worth spending.

cough cough just get rid of satoshi dice cough cough

This.

Yes, assuming you mean "with a single input of value 3.000005"* that is the current (since 0.3.19?) behavior.

*(if instead your wallet had, say two inputs of respective values 3 and .000005 it would just use the first exactly)

Huh? this has little to nothing to do with SD. AFAIR they no longer create _very_ small outputs at the level implicated here.

You, sir, have the patience of a saint.

I dont get the problem... I dont see why you wanna send uBTC 54 or lower... Its 0.007$... thats ONE cent.. It only spams the blockchain... I dont get the problem...

This is about changing the fundamentals of bitcoin. Transactions should not be limited..... PERIOD.  This goes against everything bitcoin has said it stood for.

There has always been a limit and that 0.00000001BTC.. So why not increase the limit while the prices go up? Those under one cent transactions only fill up the blockchain

To understand what gmaxwell said, I find this explanation of fees (http://bitcoinfees.com/) helpful.

Today.  What about tomorrow or the next.  The whole idea of bitcoin is we don't have someone telling us how we can or can't spend our coins.  This all changes when GAVIN decides so.  This is not decentralization.  This is a dictator telling us what we can and can't do with our money.  This goes against everything I was told bitcoin stood for.  This will collapse the entire notion of what bitcoin says it is as a whole if this happens.

I think you guys are missing the point here.

The tx fee structure we currently use, plain sucks. It's been revised a couple of times as the BTC price rose over the years. These dust tx's cost more to spend than they are worth, they're essentially useless right now.

Once BTC price rises enough we will of course remove this patch and revise the tx fee rules to allow these transactions to be spent.

Do not download the 0.8.2 client and do not mine at pools that use 0.8.2.


What the heck is the point in having 8 digits if you can't use them?

We might as well move to 4 digits. Fuck this.

You can't use them right now. Try spending a 1satoshi input, you'll need to pay a 0.0005BTC tx fee to send it.

This. And I think it is still configurable for miners (might require a recompile though).

Don't even need to— it's set based on the fee value that gets treated as zero for priority purposes. So presumably miners will lower that amount (no recompile is required) if the value of Bitcoin increases, so even absent new versions with revised defaults we're not stuck with it entirely.

The earlier versions of the software in the days of Satoshi only used two digits, in fact.

So effin what.  I'm still free to do it.  Someone should not tell me how much I can or can't spend.  "Let's protect the stupid." Sorry that is the system we are already living in.  This is why I've moved to bitcoin/litecoin.  If bitcoin protocol adopts this then it becomes the very thing it's said it's against and is meaningless.

And you still are, its no problem to remove the patch, but the actual purpose of the patch is to make SatoshiDice stop filling the blockchain with dust (I'm going to come right out and say it).

The real problem with blocking "dust" transactions is that it makes it more difficult to develop colored coin infrastructure using bitcoin. And to me, that is the most powerful application of decentralized payment networks. Imposing a barrier to developing that killer app on btc means that it will be developed first, or at least much more fluently, on another network or alt chain. I don't really think it's necessary to boycott btc client upgrades though. The market will sort out whether this is the killer app that I predict, or whether bitcoin is best used as a store of value as opposed to a payment network.

I don't give a shit.  This is regulation of bitcoin.  End of story. 

No one should be told how much they can or can't spend.  This is against everything I've understood of Bitcoin.

And you're still free to do that, just add the 5000x more (1/10th what you otherwise needed as fee) to the actual output value. Not only does it cost less marginally than litecoin's multiply the fee by the number of dust outputs, but the recipient isn't saddled with a bunch of inputs that cost them more to spend then they yield in coin.

No it doesn't— just use larger (but still 'subcent') colored coins... at least then when someone loses interest in some color (or the color becomes worthless) there is some economic incentive to go remove them from perpetual fast storage by sweeping them up.

Uh. Bitcoin has _always_ had restrictions, without any restrictions it wouldn't be worthwhile— it would be over the first time some anti-social jackass types   "while true; do bitcoind sendtoaddress `bitcoind getnewaddress` 0.0000001 ; done".  No one should be forced to carry around megabytes of random people's non-finanicial data storage just because they want to be a Bitcoin node, no one should receive payments that cost more to redeem than they are worth,  Bitcoin wouldn't be practically decentralized today if some evil visa-operative could run my above shell script and have made the blockchain 200gbytes in size, etc.  The opposite of control isn't no control.

This is bullshit.

If you do this, you kill any credibility Bitcoin has.

It's not Gavin's place to DICTATE what transactions should be allowed and what transactions should not be allowed.

The beautiful mathematical design of Bitcoin just makes sense. This does NOT make sense in the same theoretical, effortless way. This is arbitrary.

Gavin, if you can't come up with an actual decent, good system for transaction fees that makes sense and solves this problems as a mere CONSEQUENCE, instead of enforcing it in a ridiculous, absolutely not thoughtful way, then you don't deserve to be the main developer behind Bitcoin and you should GET THE FUCK OUT of the way.

I'm so unbelievably angry right now that the main person responsible for the progress of the Bitcoin software is even considering this. If there ever was a time where we needed Satoshi, this is it.

Mark my words, if you implement this, it's the beginning of the end, the end of something beautiful. You do NOT have the right to make such a decision!

So what if you have to pay 0.0005? At least you can still do it.

Maybe you are miss understanding, here is how it works right now:

I have 1BTC. I send you 1 satoshi. I now have 0.99999999BTC

You receive 0BTC, because the 1 satoshi is unspendable because there is a 0.0005BTC fee to spend it.

The Blockchain grows in size, using up more space on every Bitcoin user's PC & network resources are wasted.

Now please tell me why we shouldn't have this patch?

Please everyone read carefully what gmaxwell has to say. He knows a lot more about the inner workings of Bitcoin than any of you (including me). (I'm not saying to blindly follow him, but please take a few minutes to comprehend what he tries to explain to you).

I'll say!

Thanks for the quality explanations gmaxwell  :)

It's not censorship, if you ask me, its like the other person not getting the BTC at all because they can't spend it. Why should we have transactions where the sender looses BTC and the receiver gets nothing?

Delete the private key if you want to make your BTC unspendable, don't bloat the blockchain with it.


Its fairly simple to remove the patch if you like, I'm not sure but I think nodes will still broadcast the tx, right?


They should, SDice abuses the system, Bitcoin resources aren't unlimited, we have to share the resources between us. SDice should play nice and use the Bitcoin network resources efficiently and not waste them.

You sure like that word. I thought I did too ... too bad you're well on your way to destroying its meaning.

What the heck are you talking about? How was anyone censored? Or are you just happily making up stuff? :(

It just shows that while Bitcoin is working using irrefutable mathematics it is still under the personal whim of gullible people thus rendering it unstable, perhaps even more unstable because the whole thing is managed by financially unstable individuals who would sell their soul happily to wreck everything we have worked so hard for.

Kind of reminds me of how totalitarian governments acquires control, first scare the masses with the threat of terrorism (S.Dice) then ask them to surrender their rights for the government (Gavin) to protect them, then continue spewing propaganda claiming anyone to resist is a traitor.

Ideally, you would have a "tree" system where Bitcoin separates into two different builds, perhaps liberal/conservative style (even though both are identical in this case) and users would be able to "vote" to choose which build they want to download and use.

The only thing censored is by me hitting the ignore button on the OP and anybody else posting stupid stuff here. Plonk!

You can, but it's inelegant. The beauty of using the blockchain to trade non-btc assets is that theoretically you could use one bitcoin and create an entire private currency out of its individual satoshis. This would make bitcoin as a whole more valuable. If you say that you can only use increments of 10,000 satoshis to represent a single asset, then you're not using the entire potential of btc to communicate information. You are creating an artificial cap on the value of btc, as well as imposing an unnecessary cost on asset issuers.

If you want to spend hours and hours curating large sets of addresses containing trivial sums of cash, you're crazy. In fact, it will cost you a bundle to do so, patch or no patch. The dust issue is supposed to be eliminated by transaction fees...but, transaction fees (which IMHO are too high, but that's up to the miners) aren't high enough to make it truly expensive to stuff the block chain with large amounts of tiny transactions (bear in mind that transactions can also carry arbitrary text too).

Thus, any jerk with $100 can insert text into the block chain that is illegal is some jurisdictions. I mean, I don't live in a country where the government might kill me because I have a file on my computer that say "to hell with {insert religious figure}," but there probably are Bitcoin users who do.

The only people really affected by this patch are those using the blockchain for non-economic purposes (like Satoshi Dice saying, sorry, you lost...that's just transmitting information, nothing of current or relative value exchanges hands).

I think a wiser approach (which is being debated by the devs) would be something like tying the dust definition to the size of a transaction fee. Also, they can undo this change in the future, so keep your worthless SD transactions safe...someday you might be able to spend them in an economic manner.

Well I pay 0.001 mbtc dont want fee inflation lol

Ripple?

Then spam clogs the network.


False.  Anti-spam relay rules have been blocking transactions since the first days of bitcoin.

In the past, you might get dropped for sending 0.01 BTC, instead of the much-low levels of today.

Actaully you should be doing the reading, because your claim is completely wrong.

Miners choose what transactions to include or not include.  Many choose not to include e.g. S.D stransactions or very small transactions.  This change makes it default to not include transactions which the receiver can't spend without paying more in fees than the transaction is worth, but an evil miner can easily change this and include the transaction if he wants to contribute to a denial of service against bitcoin users.  It is a soft rule, not a hard rule.

I don't believe for a second that you are an actual programmer, btw.

Transactions have always been limited.  In the past, the limit was far higher than it is today.

The software has always dictated which transactions are relayed, or not.

This change makes it easier to change that limit, in fact.

Exactly. 0.8.2 will actually lower the base fee for low priority transactions (well, unless its decided to undo this, I guess), but then does this to prevent that change from further opening the floodgates to non-currency transactions.

It is tied to the transaction fees— though instead of being tied to the ones actually used, its tied to the miner configurable dust-fee threshold.  And not just "they" can undo, miners— anyone can set it.

You idiots know it's just a default setting that can be changed, right?

You can just change this in the config, and connect to a few nodes in pools that accept non-standard tx's.

Well that is clever. Two birds with one stone. I'm glad there are people smarter than me thinking this through. I do wish someone would invent anti hysteria cream...perhaps it's just plain old teenager angst run amok, but, people seem to think something more than just "ho-hum" is going on. It's kind of a big yawner (unless you're SD or misinformed)...

I will definitely not update. Even if some agree this was correct, basing it in the price of USD... 54ubtc will be 1 cent of a dollar when its value is aprox 184 USD, so what's the point to have a digital cryptocurrency that can't allow even that? And you know changing it deppending on USD price is totally wrong

The very moment Bitcoin's basic principles / ideas underlying Bitcoin system were explained to me I knew Bitcoin is a scientific beauty. I am a mathematical layman, but the beauty of the concept simply floored me. Just like Mona Lisa smile would floor a neanderthal.


Yes, it is. I thought that how Botcoin system works cannot be changed unless 100% of the participants agree. Being a silly newbie I realize that I might not be understanding the exact, the whole and the true picture of the case though.

Out of curiosity:

1. Why not 100 or 1000 micro BTC, but 54 BTC? 100 or 1000 is nicer and divides better.

2. Couldn't devs spend their valuable time on providing upgrades with non-controvertial features?

Why not just make a fork? I think it's just one or two lines of code, so should be easily done.

It is this way, indeed. If some people decide to start their nodes with a different minimum fee setting, and if some miners / pools decide to continue to accept dust transactions  (or if Someone^(TM) writes an alternative client) then they continue to be propagated and mined...



This new patch defines "dust" outputs by comparing their value to the required minimum fee.

There is now a comandline setting to change that minimum fee (previously it was hard wired). If you change that setting for your client, the threshold for "dust" transactions is adjusted accordingly.


Who determines what is non-controversial?

It's open source.  Fork away.

Though the consequence is that you remain at a higher, hardcoded fee level, and people will still dump megabytes worth of non-currency data into the blockchain (wikileaks cables etc.).

Exactly what I meant.

It's all democratic so people should just stop whining and fork away, and the network will vote by foot.

You just make an observation:
- if you there are zero people ranting about a certain modification then the issue is non-controversial;
- if there are people ranting, then it's controversial.

That makes absolutely no sense. So we're going to use Bitcoin 2 to handle microtransactions, but not use it to hold value? Why not just use one Bitcoin network for both, and avoid having the complicated situation of having two protocols that work almost exactly the same but are incompatible and used for different purposes?

The alternative is to not use the default value in the client, or not upgrade to the 0.8.2 client. This is NOT a protocol change. People are free to use other clients, or simply change the default value to something else. What you've proposed would harm adoption of Bitcoin-like currency, by increasing the coin supply which harms the perception of bitcoin scarcity, would make Bitcoin less useful, by fragmenting the network across multiple blockchains, and would not unfold as you imagine, as whatever blockchain is used for transactions would end up being used to store value as well.

[ETA this was in reply to Loozik]

So the devs should only spend time making changes that no-one is going to rant about?

The trouble with that approach is, sometimes the people who rant, are idiots. Must we really all remain non-controversial so that morons don't start shouting?

Should biologists and climate scientists stop studying evolution and global warming because there are yahoos out there for whom those topics are controversial?

Should we abhor censorship so much that we work ourselves up into righteous indignation whenever someone shrilly cries out that censorship is happening? Even when it's, you know, not?

Perhaps a better idea would be, instead of tut-tutting whenever controversy arises, maybe we should study what both sides of the controversy have to say, so that we can quickly come to the realisation that one side consists of thoughtful people who know what they are doing, while the other side consists of people who SHOUT IN CAPS to cover their inability to think coherently?

I don't know how gmaxwell, jgarzik and Gavin put up with this, really I don't.

Sorry for the nitpicking, but at that point you, as a developer have allready spent your valuable time on implementing that modification. Finding out what and how to do it is the bulk of any development work.

One thing many people don't understand: Open-Source is not democratic. Open Source development values doing over debating. Some people thus say, Open-Source is a "meritocratiy": who achieved the most, has the most say.

The morale is: if you're unsatisfied with the dev's work, then learn to code and do better. It isn't hard, actually ;)

I just hope they realize that for every one of these screaming lunatics who can't read, there are tens of thousands of us who appreciate their hard work. Thanks, guys.

Nothing to worry about here..

It's just a default value, and not a protocol change !

This change is really insificant... Like dust tx are.  Come on, be realistic.  For this default to be reajust, to enable Tx of half a penny, 1 BTC must worth 10 000 !

I'll update to 0.8.2 !

Those panic thread are not usefull, and beside the track IMHO !


EDIT : Reading further, I think im wrong about 1 BTC = 10 000 fiat for a .5 penny..   anyway..
Tx fees should be the real factor overall !

I'm not trying to pump altcoins, but if staying on 0.8.1 will not create a fork, then I think it's a great idea. Let the miners decide!

Ultimately, there's going to be all sorts of diversity in which miners include which transactions. Some with high fees, some with low fees, some with NO fees! Some that allow dust, others that don't.

Nancarrow, Justusranvier, Itchthyo,

Just to clarify, I wasn't ranting, nor was I taking the opposite position to anybody. I just asked a few questions.

I think asking questions while being a newbie is better than being ignorant.

Exactly.

Gavin is going to fuck over bitcoin with this.

My comment was not intended for the people who are behaving reasonably.

People who are spreading FUD while using a profile pic that promotes Litecoins do make me wonder on the other hand.

No worries, I wasn't accusing you of ranting, I was just taking issue with your plea for the developers to be 'non-controversial', as the developers aren't responsible for the existence of shrieking imbeciles (I do not accuse you of being one).

And asking questions is definitely better than being ignorant. But even better than asking questions is reading first. See the addendum to this post for example: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=196138.msg2040160#msg2040160

Especially given that this is something which only takes a few lines of change to be undone, the kind of whining around here probably says a lot more about the whiners rather than the developers, that they may not really care about the well-being of the network but want to spread FUDs instead.

I dont know... It's been interesting to watch this unfold. I think it says more about the new reality of a reddit sub with 40,000 members and how the development team communicates changes to the community.

The reality is a base level of understanding is required to comprehend the changes being made, and without that base level it's very easy to jump to incorrect conclusions.

You need to manage to understand everything about something if you want you use it in the perfectly trustless way, or you will need to trust someone to do that for you, like the dev team.

If the developers have to spend a lot of their time convincing people about their decisions, then they essentially become politicians. Miners must make decisions for themselves, rather than listening to developers.

Which is good, because it makes it a bit more difficult to be an evil miner.  No, this has nothing to do with censorship.  It is pure common sense.

Which version are you on, btw?  You know outputs of 0.00000000 were "censored" (i.e. made non-standard) around version 0.6 or so, right?  Those are still allowed, just not considered a standard bitcoin transaction any more.  Those are just as useless as outputs of 0.000005 BTC, and waste just as much space in the blockchain, but better because they can be pruned and don't waste resources in the UTXO set.
It says "programmer for hire" under your name.  Perhaps you rent out your daddy or something?

Hm... I would rather see this implemented using a payment infrastructure that is truly open source, and where the units of transmission are not 100% owned by the developers. Ripple has its own problems that are even more offensive to me than this (hopefully temporary) inconvenience in btc. That said, I would be happy to see the value of my ripple holdings grow exponentially when people start using the network to issue MMORPG gold, or cell phone minutes, or some other private currency using the ripple network. Whoever makes that happen will create a frickin trillion dollar ecosystem.

By not upgrading, you wil not get the benefit of lower txfee either.  The txfee in 0.8.1 is much higher than your 54µBTC.  If you want to go back to the versions where even smaller transactions were considered standard, your txfee will be five times higher than in 0.8.1.

One line in bitcoin.conf is enough.  You will need quite a bit of RAM to handle all the spam in mempool, since it will take a long time to confirm.

I wish. 0-value outputs can't be pruned because they can still be spent. I _think_ I'd like us to some day make 0-value txouts impossible to spend (e.g. via a softfork), and then they could be pruned... but it's not clear if perhaps there wouldn't be good uses for them, and there is no rush now because since they're non-standard their use isn't large or increasing.  Getting rid of them has "theoretical attractiveness" because so long as there are no zero value outputs the maximum size of the utxo set is bounded and known. (And before someone gets spun up, I don't think the same about low but not zero value txouts, for all the obvious reasons)

It was easier to make 0 value txouts non-standard because there was no uncertainty about future Bitcoin values or such— it's obvious that a zero value output can't yield more Bitcoin than it costs to spend, since it yields none at all. :) Without the uncertainty you don't need to wonder about how you'll adjust things over time or what the right initial threshold is, etc.

I've upgraded my miners to the current git already.  No more unspendable spam or DoS outputs relayed or stored into the blockchain by me!  (I mine solo.)

So who has actually been DoS by outputs I never seen anyone say anything about that. But good your solo mining does nothing so your not any threat :)

You have absolutely no clue whatsoever.  And since you obviously don't bother to read anything which doesn't line up 100% to your religious fantasies about how Bitcoin works, I don't expect you will ever get one.  Do you even run a Bitcoin node?  Noticed it takes quite a bit of disk space and it's memory footprint seems to be increasing by the day?  Not a DoS in progress, you say?  I can't even run a full node on the computer I'm typing on now any more.  It has mined quite a few blocks in the past.

My miners are high on the seed list.  Just stopping any dust transactions right there and not passing them on to other nodes will make them more difficult to get through.  And I still find a block now and then.  Mining solo makes more BTC in the long run than mining in a pool, and I get them in nice, large non-dust chunks. :-)

Since I run 3 nodes, and a testnet node. currently I don't even notice the node running on my laptop (couple years old macbook pro) which I am using now. So maybe update your computer, or if your running a netbook obviously your not going to run a node on their.

i am a simpleton and a newbie but after i read this reddit, i feel better:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1drocs/to_everyone_wringing_their_hands_over_the_recent/ (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1drocs/to_everyone_wringing_their_hands_over_the_recent/)

disclosure: i am not a programmer

my idea: create a 8.0.1Z version or something that is IDENTICAL to the current one with the only different being the version number, this way it helps to quantify the support, or lack of the movement to keep microtransactions going on.

(not stating my opinion towards the issue, this is just an idea, instead of just flat out ignoring the new version)

So... Let me get this straight... Everyone is all wound up because the fee's have changed...

--- bitcoin 8.1 (main.h around line 45)
static const int64 MIN_TX_FEE = 50000;
/** Fees smaller than this (in satoshi) are considered zero fee (for relaying) */
static const int64 MIN_RELAY_TX_FEE = 10000;
----

--- bitcoin (git just cloned, main.cpp around line 57)
int64 CTransaction::nMinTxFee = 10000;  // Override with -mintxfee
/** Fees smaller than this (in satoshi) are considered zero fee (for relaying) */
int64 CTransaction::nMinRelayTxFee = 10000;
----

Umm... WTF?

I suppose gavin screwed up and should have written instead:

int64 CTransaction::nMinTxFee = 50000;  // Override with -mintxfee


Then everyone would be happy...

Storm in a teapot.

If you actually read you understand but you are clueless, so I take pitty on you.

I did, I read the code the only real change in the behavior is it's checking a run time variable vs a constant.. and said run time variable is different then the constant, if one wants the old behavior pass old value to new run time variable. Or if really concerned write a patch that changes that magic number back to the old magic number and put in a pull request.

It is so much more than... so please read this thread and you will see where the problem lies.

It also calculates the threshold where a transaction can't be spent without costing so much in fees that it's not worth spending. This is derived at runtime from the values you quoted.

And if such a "dust" transaction comes through the p2p network, it ignores it.  If a miner mines it, then so be it, but the node itself won't contribute to propagation of the dust spam.

Miners can set this threshold at runtime easily instead of having it compiled in.

You keep calling it censorship, and trying to control how you spend your btc... Well lets flip that around, as a miner you are telling me that I have to include every one of your transactions no matter what. And I should spend my resources confirming your transactions just because that's what you want. However if I choose to only include transactions that have a fee attached I'm censoring you? You (and anyone else) are free to broadcast as many transactions as you want, of whatever size you want, however you are not free to tell me which ones I have to process or the order in which I have to process them. So as a miner if I decide that from this point on any transaction I include in any block I process will have a 0.001 fee or I will not work it how am I censoring you? Sure I'll include your 0.00000001 transaction but it will cost you 0.001 for me to do so, why? Cause that's my cost to run this node, you don't like it? Run your own node or someone else can pick it up for less and once it's in a block everyone will carry it.

I also read where this is the first step in automating the minimum tx fee. At this point, seeing as this is not done, we can only speculate on how this will be implemented. I for one hope that whatever I pass as a command line argument or set in a config file will override the automated method. But I will reserve judgement on that.

I explained this a hundred times and it is just going in a circle, you can get find my answer here or in another one of these threads.

I'm no religious person by any means, but thank god for open source, no matter how this turns out there will now always be alternatives.

Lets hope so. Point is, the decision will be made to do this even though it is wrong to do in the first place.

If we refuse to upgrade will we be treated differently when it comes to making transactions with small amounts? Will we even be included in the blockchain?

Hi you can not transfer less than 0.001 bitcoin to be able to get in to the queue to get in to a block. So it is impossible already.
If am wrong please explain how i can transfer 0.00005395 from one of my wallet to an other ?
As it is now no one is willing to relay that transaction through the network.

If all your peers are running with the settings at 0.0001, then this happens as they drop it:
2013-05-06 20:29:16 ERROR: CTxMemPool::accept() : nonstandard transaction type
Your client will keep retrying and eventually it might find a peer that will relay it, and with luck it'll reach a miner that will mine it.

Of course, since 0.8.2 changes it from a hard coded, compiled in setting to a user-setting then who knows?  It can be lowered and 0.8.2 gives people the choice.  Heck, people can even increase the minimums on their p2p node if they wish.

A large enough fee can buy almost any valid transaction a place in the blockchain.  Why anyone would want to spend a high fee to insert an unspendable amount into the blockchain is unknown to me, but you are free to do it.  You can even send 0 BTC if you want to, but expect to pay a decent fee to get it mined.

When I started using Bitcoin, and Satoshi was still active, it was impossible to send less than 0.01 BTC using the standard client.  Looks like it was a big mistake to make it too liberal in later versions.  When the default client settings move back slightly towards what they used to be, due to the irresponsible spam of unspendable transactions, people who don't have a clue about how Bitcoin works start screaming and whining about censorship and whatnot.

Your reasoning is backwards, if the price goes up the limit should be decreased to keep the balance, not the other way around.

Just saying.

for the moment...don't forget, we still are boot strapping.  The purpose is to limit block chain size growth while the network infrastructure matures. 

Don't have to boycott, for those who don't want it, just don't install.  Or better still fork your own coin.

that's the definition of boycott

If you don't like the default value that ships with 0.8.2 all you have to do is add a line to your bitcoin.conf file with a different threshold. You can even set it to zero if you want. That's much better than previous versions because with them you had to patch the source code and recompile to change these values.

Problem solved - there is absolutely no legitimate reason to keep whining about this.

Any miner you can convince to boycott 0.8.2 is a miner you can also convince to change a line in their bitcoin.conf file.

There's still no excuse for all the whining and drama.

I declare a counter-boycott, with a .0005BTC value threshold for relays! Push the dusty bastards to LTC!

No dictatorship - anyone is free to whine and I am free to point out their whining as pointless, unjustified and unproductive.

If you're opposed to the default policy in 0.8.2 there two relevant possibilities that affect which courses of action will achieve a result you desire: either it's possible to persuade miners to follow you (actual miners, not hashing subcontractors), or it's not possible to persuade them.

If it's not possible to persuade them then talking about a boycott is pointless because they won't listen to you.

If it is possible to persuade them then the best course of action is to convince them to upgrade to 0.8.2 and set their -mintxfee and -mintxrelayfee to values you consider to be better than the defaults.

If one day I will get big I pledge to pursue the vision of what Bitcoin ought to look like, meeting up with the CIA will certainly not be on my schedule.

Gavin =Satoshi?

If you can't convince even one single solitary miner to join your cause, shouldn't you begin to consider that maybe the problem is you?

I agree with you that it's better if we can send any amount. What I'm suggesting is that everybody who wants this should pursue a strategy for achieving it that actually has a chance of working.

.. Shhhhhhhh, no, let them carry on blindly pursuing the one strategy that has the lowest mathematical chance of possibly allowing them to send transactions smaller than a "Gavin" in size  ::)
 ;D ;D
Obviously they need miners for this.
As you've pointed out:
1) REALLY HARD SOLUTION: Convince some miners to boycott 0.8.2 ALTOGETHER

2) MUCH EASIER SOLUTION, just as effective: Convince some miners to simply edit their .conf files.

That we have 8 pages of discussion on this is just hilarious. Either way you have to get some miners on your side, and it would obviously be much easier to convince one to edit the .conf file than to boycott the new version altogether.

I love how on the first page, one person is like "The majority of bitcoiners oppose this new change" (lol) and another person says "This is practically a protocol change!"
If this were a protocol change... well, it's either a protocol change, or it's not. And it's not. Based on that initial impression, I assume the rest of the thread is meaningless drivel so I skipped it.

Well, I guess that confirms where the problem is.  Next time, maybe try not to insult your potential allies.

Actually, I'd almost forgotten about this topic.  At one point, I had been thinking about changing my p2pool miners to accept tiny transactions, but your insane rantings convinced me to stick with the defaults.

Who else almost forgot that the blockchain is over 7GB?

You forgot word Already

Your position can be broken down into two parts:

Part 1.  "I think we should allow arbitrarily small transaction output amounts"   - rational, opinion
Part 2.  "and I want everyone else to be forced to comply with my will instead of being allowed to make their own choices.  Also, the devs are using evil sorcery to trick people into doing their bidding.  The newly added option that lets people express their own policy preferences easily was the last ingredient in their evil spell."  - cookoo, cookoo

(For readers new to this discussion, please read gweedo's many, many posts on this theme, here and elsewhere.  I feel that I've summarized his actual expressions very accurately and fairly.  I don't think that he's ever used the actual word "sorcery", but his logic chain would make underpants gnomes cringe:  1. Devs.  2. ? ? ?  3. Evil/Centralized/Controlled/Undemocratic/Whatever. )

kjj +10, an accurate summation of gweedo's strange efforts  ;D

Still not a problem for the equipment available for a home PC.

Nobody's "forcing you" to do anything, they're just rejecting your potential transactions that don't meet certain requirements.

I feel like this has probably been explained to you multiple times so I am probably wasting my time. But here goes. It's simple:
-Miners have always been able to choose which size transactions to accept or decline.
-It used to be very hard to do this and require reconfiguration and recompiling the code
-Now it's very easy to do this via a .conf file. 

The miners are 'forcing' you, just like they always have, to only expect to have a tx included in a block if it meets their requirements. It just so happens to be a lot easier to change those requirements now.

The baker does not have to accept the candlesticks from the candlestick maker if they do not meet his specifications. The butcher does not have to accept the bread from the baker if they do not satisfy his taste buds. The auto mechanic does not have to service your car if you hand him a little toy plastic car and he knows you're not worth his time. The miner does not have to accept your tx if he doesn't want to - no matter the reason.

You'd be a pretty good socialist. You want to keep the code in its archaic form where miners are [almost] forced to accept ALL transactions because the method to restrict certain tx types involves an intimate understanding of how to reconfigure and recompile the codebase that most miners won't have. That's like the automakers who use fancy security torx bits on the MAF sensor for no other reason than the torx companies have a deal with the automaker so they sell more security torx bits. This change is like Gavin replacing the fancy torx bits with a philips-head bolt or hex head.

Sounds like someone can't handle the free market ;D Welcome to Bitcoin.

Dude nice harddrive! What make and model is it? And what linux distro do you run?

On-Topic: Yes, almost any miner and bitcoin user is capable of storing the blockchain, however, it simply is not efficient for mobile devices.

Well free markets are all about competition right? Why not code your own Bitcoin platform that can host Node code that you believe in, and promote it?

Does it really HAVE to be though? As long as your fixes work, and transactions get seen, there shouldn't be an issue right?

True. That wouldn't help too much. I still think the microtransaction thing needs to be revised. There was no vote, there was no community decision. The hard filter value of 0.00000539 BTC or whatever it is should have been voted on. Client development currently isn't democratic, and that's why I continue to run the 0.8.1 client and host that node version.

I totally agree with you on that. The devs are letting their opinions rule development.

There is no hard value.  You vote by setting the dust threshold for your node.  5430 satoshis is simply the default.  If a significant minority of nodes make it 1000 instead then smaller tx will be relayed.  So the framework for your "vote" is there right now.  Staying on an obsolete version is just silly though.  You do realize you can set the dust threshold to whatever you want in 0.8.2?

I will upgrade the node. What line needs to be added to the conf file to change the dust threshold?

LVM over mdraid-6 on eight LUKS-formatted 2TB hard drives of varying brands and manufacturing lots. Gentoo Linux.

Mobile devices and casual users will soon have better options (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=204283.0) that will not require them to attempt to store the entire blockchain or trust a central server.

Because they wouldn't be able to spend it.

You are welcome to send micro-transactions in Namecoin.

0.9? Jesus, still waiting for 0.7!

Watch it, or you'll be a marked man by the army-sized LTC dev team..."

Litecoin differences to Bitcoin:
Scrypt insted of SHA256
Average block time 2.5 minutes

Somebody enlighten me how this solves any of Bitcoin's fundamental problems with micro-transactions or blockchain bloat. As a matter of fact Litecoin has all the same basic design problems Bitcoin has, they are just not as visible yet because the total transaction volume is much lower. Whatever the solution for micro-transactions might be, Litecoin isn't it.

It does not and never will solve those problems before Bitcoin solves them.

Bitcoin will always have more human and financial capital available to apply towards finding solutions to these problems.

why block a 1 satoshi transation when it could be used to by a can of soda by the end of the year  :)

Because at the present time, Bitcoin network and the Litecoin network cannot cope with it. Also 1 satoshi is expensive for the miner to put in a block.

well its still going to cause bitcoin to rise more slowly than it would otherwise would, by making it worth less and less divisible, its just an over reaction i rekon the next price upswing is coming sooner rather than later everyone is wanting in on it and its like a steam train coming down the mountain

I'm happy with a nice gently price rise. Slow and steady.  :)

Cool. I can't wait to spam the shit of out Litecoin 0.9  :D

No it isn't. DEVELOPMENT should be democratic, and we should have a say in what features are added/don't get added. Yes I can run 0.8.1 all I want, but because the node code was rewritten, my microtransactions may no longer be processed. The feature shouldn't have been added without a vote.

It doesn't.  As you point out the exact same constraints exist.  While LTC has 4x as many blocks it will incur orphans at an accelerated rate due to propagation delays for very large blocks.

A 100MB block every 10 minutes or 25MB block every 2.5 minutes the same constraint exists.   If/when LTC becomes popular it will be forced to implement "dust threshold" as well or the UXTO size will explode making the burden on full nodes even more punitive.

Those saying "LTC is designed for microtransactions" just have a bridge to sell.  It would be possible to design a cryptocurrency for micro transactions but it isn't LTC.

Seems more like common sense to me.
Careful about assigning words like censorship where they do not belong, it weakens the meaning of the word, and then when there is real censorship - no one listens because you used it this way too much.

Development can't be democratic because most people do not understand the code or the ramifications well enough to make an intelligent vote.

What FLOSS does allow is forking when someone who does understand things believes he has a better idea.

It's common sense because bitcoin is designed for meaningful currency transactions, not data storage or secret signals or whatever else you might be abusing the blockchain for with meaningless transactions.

I shouldn't have to tell you more.
Common sense should.

Also, I don't want my computer seized because there are child porn or other restricted links in the block chain.
The fact that I know they are there could be construed as knowingly downloading and distributing them.

I don't want to give the .gov ammunition to shut down bitcoin in the US claiming it is aiding child porn rings.

+1

The only problem LTC solves is what miners can do with their now Bitcoin obsolete GPUs. While I hold and currently mine LTC, the long-term viability is a concern.

You are suggesting antispam is dictatorship..
No freedom of speech is absolute like there is no such thing as absolute freedom in society.
As soon a your freedom is trampling on someone else's freedom, you are both losing freedom or you are the dictator.

Exactly. I think folks are just butthurt that there aren't any miners who will relay their tx. Instead of convincing anyone that a line in the .conf file is "censorship" they should spend their energy convincing a few miners to remove that line so that they can have their beloved microTX included in a block.
I don't understand why we're wasting so much time talking about something that was ALWAYS POSSIBLE, and now is just a little easier. We need to continue moving towards a free tx-fee market, but the socialist weenies are holding us back.

Duh! Of course you need to convince miners to mine your transactions. That's the way it has always been. That's the way it will always be.

If you want miners to mine your spammy dust transactions, then attach a nice big fee to it. You'll have plenty of miners willing to mine it for you.

Your problem is you want to send dust without paying for it.

Blah blah blah. Get some miners to change .conf files so they accept dust tx with fees. Problem solved. It's a free market, buddy. Someone can't handle it?  ::)

A line in a .conf file that can be changed by ANYONE WITH A TEXT EDITOR AND HALF A BRAIN is not 'censorship' or something that 'all the anti-government people should get all worked up about.' Lol.
Relax - I'm sure there are miners that feel exactly the same way you do, and are changing their .conf files as we speak. If not, well... tough patooties.  8) Go cry yourself to sleep.

I couldn't have said it better myself.  You do have a tendency to repeat yourself.

Your concern was addressed completely, correctly, and politely several times.  In several different threads, if I recall correctly.  You ignored us.  You insulted just about everyone on the forums, certainly everyone that was trying to discuss the matter with you.  You just keep repeating "censorship" and "dictator".

Sadly, you don't even seem to be a troll.  You seem to genuinely believe that Gavin has become a dictator by giving everyone easy tools for managing their node's relay policy, and that we are all censoring you by failing to relay your messages.

Your brain is defective.  Seek help.

If the recent code changes are worrying people so much, allow me to remind them they are free to fork the project and undo the changes. They can then release their version and the community can vote by using it or not. Can't get much more democratic than that.

Let me know when it gets released please.

What stops anyone from using 0.8.2 and setting it to accept microtransactions?  Unless it's just that the miner is too dumb to do that, the newer client is even more customizable than the last.

So how is a boycott effective unless it's miners doing the boycotting?  Are they joining in?

So what happens when your miner get flooded with micro-transactions and it can't cope?

If you do, I wish you luck.  More competition is better than less.  Just choose wisely with the field of scammers out there in the ASIC arena.

While Bitcoin may be an anarchy of sorts, it is certainly not a democracy in the traditional majoritarian sense.  I still don't see how Gavin is a dictator.  It is more like the community of miners are an oligarchy.  There's nothing forcing them going along with Gavin's ideas other than their seeming belief that it is in their interest to do so.

People generally do act in their own interest when money is concerned, and this is not necessarily a bad thing.  It seems the more configurable the Bitcoin client is, the more capable people are of doing whatever they want with it, even if that is not what Gavin wants.  Anyone doing mining is, I think, entirely capable of deviating from the default settings and, in fact, will probably have to do so just to get it to work with their systems unless they are operating with systems straight out of the box.

It just strikes me that if there is a market demand for "dust" transactions, people will figure out how to do it.  After all, once it is actually in the blockchain, it is going to continue to get confirms.  It's just that first step, which only requires ONE miner willing to include these things in mined blocks.

I got a strong feeling people believed that one day 1 Satoshi would be worth 1 cent/penny each. Tapping away on their calculators how many millions of Satoshi's they have and how much they will be worth when that price was reached. Of course to reach that price micro-transactions would have to be the norm.
Now that the reality of the situation has emerged that Bitcoin just isn't designed for micro-transactions that dream is rapidly fading away fast.

I think this is where the demand for "dust" transactions stems from.

Correct.
I have asked in a similar thread for someone to detail a fiat transaction they have had for an amount less than 1 cent. Unsurprisingly there is a deafening silence.

Go read.  It is all there.  You quoted most of it in replies.  You just didn't read it.


No, you are just an idiot.  It has nothing to do with who disagrees with you, it is all about you.  Just because we can all see that you are an idiot doesn't make us conspirators.  You are out in the open where we can all see you and draw our own conclusions.  You may prefer that believe that we all disagree with you because we are part of a secret cabal, but at some point you should really open yourself up to considering the alternative, that you are just plain wrong about this.

I understand your point of view completely.  I've read it in detail, and I've responded to it.  Freedom of speech does not include the ability to force other people to replicate your communication against their will.  Your co-argument, that everyone wants to relay your transactions, but Gavin has tricked them into rejecting them because they are just plain too stupid to change their config variables is insulting to pretty much everyone, and you should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking it.

The hilarious thing is that long ago, there was a free transaction relay network.  Some people didn't like fees, so they set their nodes to relay unlimited free transactions, and they set their miners to mine them.  They published a list of nodes that you could connect to that would ensure that even low priority or non-standard transactions would get to a miner that would include them eventually.  You could have taken that approach, organizing volunteers to support your cause.  But you didn't.  You chose instead to talk shit on the forums, and in doing so, I think you've driven off pretty much everyone that was once sympathetic to you.

I am a miner and I prefer the new fee structure.  Microtransactions are certainly still possible, but they now require fees more in line with other transactions of the same size (storage-wise).  Also, larger (transfer amount) transactions are now cheaper.  I think this is a better balance.

even if Gav did have an ego, so what, who said that's bad? might make him a better DEV

If you don't like what's going on in bitcoin, just use one of the other hundred cryptocoins available.  Problem: solved.

It is far easier than that.  One simply needs to:

a) find one or more mining pool or major solo miner willing to lower their dust threshold.
b) enough users willing to modify their clients to relay those transactions
c) possibly some organization website to allow interested users to add key nodes to the Bitcoin node list in order to gain access to this "dust relay network".

Transactions of any size are still valid.  Miners creating blocks with transactions of any size won't be rejected by the network.  The complaints in this thread can basically be boiled down to:

"I want to spam the network with worthless uneconomical garbage.  Wait other people aren't going to help me.  CENSORSHIP. DICTATORSHIP.  RANT RANT RANT".  Creating dust spam is still possible it just now takes a little bit of work.  If everyone wanted to relay this junk it wouldn't be a problem they would modify their nodes so it would relay this junk.  The reality is the overwhelming majority sees no problem with limiting spam and a tiny minority is upset about that.  "I want to spam AND I want it to be easy.  Everyone should work to relay my spam they disagree with.  How dare they not?"

You do have a valid point, but, I think you've misunderstood the bottom line of most of the discussion here. The real issue isn't behind the dust transactions. That isn't even an issue I personally care about (i've also switched back to using 0.8.2). The true issue here is that the developers are adding features that aren't getting voted on. We don't have much of a say currently about the changes that they implement.

bitcoin-qt is a reference implementation.
You can develop and run other clients.

Can we develop and run clients that can host nodes as well? Or would they be considered "cancer nodes"

Yes, you're free to do whatever you want with your node. But other nodes will only accept your blocks and your transactions if it agrees with their policy. Think of it this way: bitcoin is like free speech. You're free to say whatever you want, but everyone else has no obligation to listen to you.

That is the most profound statement I have seen on this entire thread so far. Thanks for the clarification.

Another major issue is that these micro-transactions basically take up as much of a limited resource (space in a block) as "real" transactions.  I know I get infuriated when I am waiting for a 5 BTC transaction that is actually time-sensitive, waiting for another block, and when it comes, it's filled to the brim with bullshit .0000001 transactions and somehow, my 5 BTC transaction has missed the train despite having a transaction fee.  If the micro-transactions only consumed a commensurate amount of resources to transmit as "real" transactions, there would be less conflict.  As it is, though, often microtransactions with multiple (also tiny) inputs are actually MUCH LARGER than "real" transactions.

You can still send micro-transactions even with the default 0.8.2 options, albeit at greater trouble and required trust.

Spammer Alice wants to send user Bob a pointless 0.00000020 BTC.
Alice sends Bob 1.00000000 BTC and then after confirmations, Bob sends back Alice 0.99999980.

Everyones happy.

Well, that's all sorted we can now flag this thread as resolved and locked.

I prefer it the other way around.
Bob sends me 0.99999980 and I send 1 back. When I remember to. Sometime in the future. Really. I promise.

I may have a solution for consolidating micro transactions! Literally just came to me.

One Node Processing Multiple Dust Payments to One Person

Say John, Alice, and Kate all want to send microtransactions to Joe. Each one being 0.00000001 BTC. A Satoshi. (In this situation, the network blocks dust transactions of only 1 Satoshi, 2 would pass. This is simply an example.) Because of their low transactions, they won't get processed.

Solution? How about we bundle their transactions using Nodes? We could have a list of nodes set up and displayed somewhere here on the thread, where one could register to be added to the Node's "dustbook".

So if John, Alice, and Kate were to all register with Jacob's Node, when their Satoshi transactions are sent, the Node senses them all, rewrites them, and broadcasts it to the rest of the network as a reverse sendmany transaction to Joe. So the three of them basically bundled their addresses into one virtual "wallet" hosted by the Node only in the instance of the transaction totalling their virtual balance to 0.00000003 BTC, bypassing the 1 Satoshi dust limitation, and Joe gets their dust transactions.

The 1 Satoshi transactions wouldn't be displayed in the blockchain though. Their Satoshis would probably have to be sent directly to the node in some manner, where they then get rebroadcasted in one transaction. It's more efficient than having 3 transactions, and the dust value would go through.

To apply this to Bitcoin's current rules, just simply add more people and a slightly higher value to their transactions.

Graphical Representation:

1John -> JacobNode

1Alice -> JacobNode } JacobNode -> 1Joe

1Kate -> JacobNode

The transactions to JacobNode wouldn't show up in blockchain, but the transaction from the Node to Joe would. The transactions into the Node don't need to be broadcasted because the Node would be able to verify that the addresses have the Bitcoin in the first place because of the blockchain anyways.

Faucet Solution

1 Satoshi dust limit situation

Simply, a faucet would pool up a person's faucet earnings until they passed the dust limit. Or on the faucet site, implement a "Cash Out" button that only becomes available after the 1 Satoshi dust limit is passed.

what's the advantage of this over off-the-chain transactions? It's essentially what you're proposing.

When I was born the smallest denomination of coins in my currency was worth about 0.001 USD.  Everybody agreed it was dumb and an annoyance and a waste of time and wallet space, so we stopped production of the coins.  You can still use them for payment if you have some, but a merchant don't have to accept them.  I don't think many will.

Over the years the same thing happened to the lowest denomination of coins several times.  Last year production of the coin worth ~0.1 USD was stopped.  The lowest denomination now is worth ~0.2 USD.

I can't remember to have heard a single complaint about this.  Nobody wants their pockets to be full of worthless change.  You can collect the coins if you want to, try to spend them if you want to, accept them if you want to.  But people and businesses in general are no longer wasting their time on them.

This is more or less what is happening here.  If you have a special interest for nanotransactions you can still do them with people sharing your interest.  Common users will happily ignore the nanotransactions until someone else mine them, because they are dumb and an annoyance and a waste of our CPU time, network, storage and electricity.

Could you explain the details of how off-the-chain transactions work? Wasn't aware of such an option.

However, the advantage here is that micro transactions can go on with people who want them. Say 1000 people want to send a satoshi to you. Instead of 1000 meaningless transactions, my method bundles it into one. My method actually works best if the dust limit is raised even higher. However I have noticed that there is a con. Because the node bundles the input into one single wallet, they essentially act as short term banks. They could become prone to attackers wanting to steal the wallets. Only a possibility.

that's the definition of off the chain transactions: a trusted third party accumulates (stores) microtransactions and bundles them into big transactions.

Oh OK. So my method basically is an off the chain transaction. However, in my method, due to sending bitcoin to the nodes off the chain, can any transaction out of the node to whomever be confirmed? I don't know how confirmations really work.

"confirmations" come from transactions being included in a block. With off-the-chain transactions, you're trusting a third party to hold and transmit your dust payments. Also, you should look up the info yourself instead of wasting other forum members' time. Asking answered questions adds clutter to the forum.

I understand that, but would like to have various explanations to a topic because everyone thinks differently. I just don't know how you can verify that the third-party actually had real Bitcoins submitted to it. Why not just invent some Bitcoins and then send them on the chain?

It's bitcoin protocol. There's no opinions or "various explanations" on it. Also, if you attempt a double spend, all nodes will reject it. If you did some fucking research, you would know that.

Nodes would not accept that

Real world question: I'm using as many faucets as I can, and I've accumulated .005+ btc.
Using the address in my sig, will I ever be able to spend my btc assuming I continue with these microtransactions? I'm super poor.
I haven't finished reading the thread, btw, so sorry if I missed something.
Halp?

If you keep spending instead of saving in life, you'll always stay poor.

Yes, that's right, get used to it. 

Developer consensus can change the protocol rules, that's just how it works. 

No one is forced to download the changes.  If the chain is split or poor changes are introduced, it's bad for bitcoin, but other alt currencies will become more attractive.

I think there will come a 51% attack on bitcoin, not through mining, but through attacking the developer consensus process.  Vote stuffing is normal in standarization.  For me, it's not a question of, IF, but of WHEN.  My hope is that bitcoin can survive a few more years yet. 

There's also many examples of open source projects that are well managed.  But when more money gets involved, it becomes that much harder.  So pray, that btc does not rise in price too fast ...

I think the boycott is a total failure :)

Sure.  It was never going to cause a fork, but the PR was noticed.

The more interesting question is, what kind of change *would* trigger a meaningful boycott.

If you can work that out, you've torpedoed btc ...

Thanks to bitcoin, I can actually save some money now.
I've been boycotting fiat for years now.

Thank you.
Would you be so kind as to reference 'coin aging'? I've been explaining it in terms of a bag of pennies melting into a blob of copper. Is this accurate?

I'm much obliged.

This isn't even a forking change.  If you really want to spend less than a penny, find a miner who is willing to mine your transaction and broadcast it to them.  There is no protocol change here, just some defaults about what to forward and include in blocks that can easily be changed.  If bitcoin price continues to rise, the defaults will likely be changed to adapt and in the mean time miners can edit their configuration files.

As someone who intends to store the complete blockchain until I die, I support these anti-spam measures.

I see the word "freedom" mentioned in this thread a bunch of times.

Here is a quote from Jefferson:

Luckily you still have the FREEDOM to create spammy uneconomcial transactions (once which cost more in fees that they are worth spending).  You just have to find someone willing to mine it for you.

<GASP>  Freedom means opportunity not forcing others to bend to your will. 

Spammers have the freedom to create spammy worthless transactions.
Nodes have the freedom to either relay them or not.
Miners have the freedom to decide what transactions go into the current block.

Exactly.. everyone is bitching about something easily configurable.

I saw the few replies regarding this but id like to point something out, The following examples all use bullshit numbers for simplicity and ease of understanding.

Transaction fees are based on the amount of data in the transaction, the more transactions you link to the larger that data set is.
(the data includes where each transaction came from, so lots of tiny amounts sent to you really add up when you spend them.)

(these are not real fees, these are total crap numbers, its just so you get the idea)
Essentially whats happening is that someone is paying you 1 penny, but it will cost you 1$ to send it., in essense, you just threw away 99 pennies to spend that 1 penny.

The difference in value of what your receiving makes all the difference here. Any amount you receive that is the same or below the minimum fee, is going to likely cost you more then you received to send it(example above). There is some wiggle room with how its all calculated but i dont think that is the most important factor for you. For example, lets say you receive 1 penny, it costs 1 penny to send it. as a result you have a net gain of 0$ if you receive 2 pennies and it costs 1 penny to send it then you have a net gain of 1 penny, or 50% of what you received, Not a vary good percentage. Even at 10 pennies  with a cost of 1 penny thats still only nets you 9 out of 10 pennies or 90% of your money. Thats like a 10% fee!

Whats my point? To put it plainly. the closer the amounts that you receive are to the fee you must pay, the less of your money you get to keep. The larger the amounts you receive, the more you get to keep.

Hopefully what im trying to say is easy to understand.


Makes me really wish bitcoinQT had some ability to select which transactions to use and the ability to view the related fees for them on the fly.

I can no l0nger use bitcoin on either a mac or windows. I cant even install the client on windows without errors and my mac is unuseable with bitcoin-qt. Yes you should boycott it, because the coding is fucking  shit.

Try Linux.

He shouldn't have to try anything. The core development team, doesn't even code anymore they all do work for other bitcoin companies and have lost focus on what is really important.

But... Linux is imo plain old way better than those OS's are. Why should bitcoin bow to inferior operating systems? Popular use is cool, but I'd be happier about 10% of all linux users using btc than 11% of windows users using it. (Note that i have no idea what these numbers actually imply.)

I honestly sense a trace of hipocrisy. How might you go about joining the core dev team to fix these problems?
I'd join, but my coding abilities take a sharp nosedive at myspace-style HTML.
Do you have any active pull requests or an altcoin in the works?
Did you know you're ignore flagged?
*gasp* Am I ignore flagged?!

Considering Mac is on par with linux I don't care about either one of them. I have even removed bitcoind from my servers, I built my own client using bitcoinj.

No.. Bad Idea. We should show support for the devs who work their ass off getting out updates.

And blocking microtransactions is a bad thing? Not only did it slow up the speed of transactions it completly spams blockchain.

I love the brain wash of the core dev team. So how did transactions get slow because of micro-transactions? It never did it was always a free market. Also how does it spam the blockchain? It doesn't, maybe instead of brainwashing people the core dev team should start actually fixing the blockchain, which has been broken, due to the lack of attention it gets. The most important part of bitcoin and it doesn't get any attention kind sad.

It spams the uxto which is normally kept in memory.

The core dev team is actually pretty good compared with most open source projects, but is still vulnerable to a 51% consensus attack...

It doesnt matter tho, because losses to bitcoin will be gains to alt currencies. 

It's competition fair and square.

Micro-transactions spam the blockchain, and it does not matter if you repeat the opposite a thousand times, like a Tibetan mantra, you are still wrong.

I am sorry to break it to you but it has never been fair. They have too much power, and sadly no one wants to fork it, so some of us have to deal with it.


And the more you say it doesn't make it right. No one has explained why it is spam? It isn't spam, when I started with bitcoin, micro-transactions were welcomed. And at that point they were worth less than they are worth now. So what changed, the core dev team can't fix the blockchain and don't want to deal with it.

I see that you joined about two weeks after SD started. Now I am not blaming SD, but I think that their business model first highlighted the effect upon the Bitcoin network of many 'legitimate' micro-transactions. Clearly a few are always tolerable, but before SD they were rare, unless they were part of a deliberate spamming attack, and overall volumes small enough that it did not matter. SD has improved a lot with its minimum (0.0005 BTC, I believe). The 0.8.2 changes reduces the risk of other pseudo-legitimate sources of high-volume micro-transactions emerging.

There are possible optimizations for blockchain handling, such as the one maaku is working on, but it is still some time off yet.

I was actually around before SD, was. But that isn't an excuse. SD created a business model, that was successful, Erik didn't do anything he wasn't suppose and even paid the fees, making that excuse a very bad one. That is the free market if it was harmful to the end user, why not stop using SD all together. But instead of doing that, the core devs took it upon them to say, that is not how we want bitcoin to be use, and they changed it. Shame on them, that is horrible and they talk about how bad money is. Look at bitspend chase shut them down, basically the core dev team did the same thing to SD. Horrible, inexcusable abuse of their power, and not an excuse as to why micro-transactions should be stopped.

For the sake of anyone reading this. This person is trying to get people to not use the new client because they think its censorship, when nobody agrees with them. Its why they have ignore lit up.


The quick break down.

-What does this patch do?

It tries to stop you from being able to send people amounts that are so small, that it costs the person receiving it more money to spend then what you sent them. To say it again, It costs them more money then you sent them. As a result it doesnt get spent and bloats the blockchain with data that *cant* be pruned because people *wont* spend it, because it costs them more money then you sent them, so why would they?

While pruning has not been implemented yet it will be, at some point.


On the page that has the client download and on the git pull, it says and has said exactly why its being implemented. After reading that, anyone that had enough of a understanding of bitcoin fully understood why its essential that it be implemented.

I honestly hope you understand why this is important.

Your semi right in the sense it does use allot of your CPU to check that new blocks it receives are valid, Why that is.. im not entirely sure. could a GPU in this case speed this up and take some of the load off of the CPU? I dont know.

If your having issues installing the client then i dont think its the clients fault.

If on the other hand you mean you cant install it because of the errors you get while its checking the blockchain, or that it stops checking it. I think that means your cpu is giving invalid information back to the program when it verifies the block. If the cpu messes up and the data ends up damaged and shows its incorrect, the client seems to stop dead in its tracks since there is no point trying to further verify a 'invalid' block. To that end.. maybe it should check a failed block twice ;D You should look into it and maybe bug the devs if this is the case.(you can simply restart the client to get it to try that block again)

Anyone else know if this is accurate?

Except it doesn't and you can easily send transactions that use 1 satoshi as the fee (per thousand bytes) using the standard bitcoin-qt client. It may take a day or two to confirm but they always go through eventually. Maybe in some future world you'll be right but as for now you are not.

You cant send a tx where the output is less than the new limit.

The new limit are based on developer estimates of cost.

But they have unintended consequences, for example, if you had made a business in colored coins, this change may hit you hard. 

Yes. Colored coins is the major casualty, however, this would seem to be a perfect market for Peter Todd's off-chain solution of fidelity bonded banks and might be a real-world proof of concept for the whole idea.

Colored coins are a pretty lousy idea anyway.

I mean they sound like a great idea at first, but they just don't seem to work when you try to actually do it.  That sort of stuff belongs in a merged mining alt-chain.  Namecoin is the proof-of-concept, but doesn't support fractional ownership, so it isn't exactly right.  A chain for general fractional ownership has been described elsewhere.  Just needs to be implemented.

OK, but my point was simply that those transactions can be spent at nigh on 0 cost regardless of how small they are. So the change is not in any way designed to save people from receiving tiny transactions because of the costs that person will incur spending them.

Well no.   If you send a spammy low priority tx with no fee there is a very good chance it will NEVER confirm.  There is also a good chance it will never even be seen by a miner in your lifetime because every node following QT rules (which is more than just the QT clients) refuses to relay low priority tx which don't include a fee.  As a result you will be forced to include a fee greater than the value of the output you are trying to spend in order to spend it which is utterly stupid.   The 0.8.2 rules simply prevent CREATING new outputs which can't be spent.  If nodes are willing to relay tx with smaller fees that threshold also decreases.  For example the current default on low priority txs is a fee that is a minimum of 0.1 mBTC and thus that same node won't relay outputs smaller than 0.0543 mBTC.  If today (or in the future) that node lowered the min mandatory fee on low priority txs to say 0.02 mBTC then it would also relay outputs as small as 0.01086 mBTC.

Then riddle me this transaction

8bdb360363e17164a1a897f56e8ce9ab1f5deb1fed6786f7a74411e7ef2403b5

Which pays a 1 satoshi fee to get over the 1000B limit and include multiple "dust" transactions. So tell me again how dust can't be spent? Can you show me one transaction with a 1 satoshi (or more) fee that hasn't confirmed in over a couple of weeks?

Neither of that transaction's outputs are dust.  They are both >= 0.01 BTC.

Transaction inputs may be any amount.

No, the argument is that output dust is blocked to prevent the recipient from being charged with tx fees when they are next used. My point is you can freely use dust so there's no need to protect anyone. Now, if you want to say that we are protecting the blockchain from bloat then that's a legitimate argument. But don't lie and claim that people can't freely spend dust if they want to.

Litecoin banned microtransactions a while ago by requiring huge (0.01) fees.  It's still going strong.  Stop whining.

Let me try to clarify.

There is no rule preventing anyone from spending money they already have in their wallet, even if it is dust. Fees still apply and have always applied if the transaction doesnt qualify as free.(see rules regarding the fee structure).
This change would effectively prevent you from making a transaction with dust as an output.
Regardless of this change(and the guidelines before it) you can still connect to a miner that is willing to mine your 'non standard'(dust) transactions for you.

What the fee structure roughly is: (Age of money) *magic* (amount of money) *magic* (size of transactions) *magic!*.  A transaction can be free if its under that 1000 bytes and its number from that magic math is low enough to allow it to be sent for free.(feel free to look up the exact details)


On the new client your transaction didnt have dust as an output, so its a legit transaction.
Going by your transaction there are 2 possibilities.
-It passed the 'magic' so it didnt need a fee.
-Some miner was willing to mine your low value transaction even if it was considered dust.

To try to reiterate the point of all of this. If someone or several people or hundreds of people send you dust from many transactions, with more then 2-3 pieces of dust as an input you have gone over the size limit for a transaction to be free(unless you can find a miner to mine it). As a result you MUST include a fee if you want it in a block in reasonable time, or if you want it to be relayed by the network. The fee for these types of transactions can as a result be larger then the dust you are gathering from inside your wallet. Which brings back the question 'would you spend that dust if the transaction fee cost you more then the dust is worth?'

I hope this clarifies things a bit.

Boy there is a lot of interesting points of view in this thread.

An economic majority is one of the unique Great/Terrible features that bitcoin relies upon.

I saw many posts indicating that bitcoin was not designed/intended for micro-payments, which I do not believe is completely accurate. Since bitcoin has a strong deflationary bias, the average transaction size will DECREASE with time, making payments today that we may consider micro-payments, be standard payments in the future.

Addressing the arbitrary .01 cost of a transaction (or .0005) is an absolute must. Clearly the best solution is to let the miners set the fee that they will accept and process transactions so that competition and deflation can automatically adjust the cost.

As for dealing with wallet dust, probably the easiest way to deal with this is simply to export the keys from any/all wallets and then import them back into one wallet to consolidate your dust. It may still result in a transaction fee but at least you can keep all your pennies in one jar.

I like what I highlighted in red. But the dust we are talking about is mainly from all these transactions from faucets and satoshidice. Other than that though, what do people use microtransactions for?

When we talk about micro transactions we are talking about the purchasing power not necessarily the nominal units.  Today the dust limit is ~5000 Satoshis worth about half a US penny.  If the exchange rate rose to $5,000 the limit may fall to say 100 Satoshis still worth about half a US penny.

Case in point the min mandatory fee for low priority transactions (an anti DOS mechanism) has been reduced four times from 0.01 BTC to 0.0001 BTC over the years in light on

Regardless of the exchange rate Bitcoin is highly unlikely to be efficient for micro transactions (say transactions with a purchasing power equivalent to a few US pennies or less, circa 2012).


That doesn't do anything.

The dust I am referring to is generated from mining (< .0001) or from transactions where division is required and the results are many digits out (maybe pay per click web adds). While Satoshidice is certainly the biggest dust generator at the time, there is no way to avoid transactions getting smaller with time due to deflation so a fixed cost will absolutely fail in the long run. This is already become an issue because bitcoin went from $10 USD per coin to over $200 per coin, so suddenly the minimum fee went from .10 USD to $2.00 USD - This is deflation and it is already negatively affecting what we would consider small transactions (a cup of coffee now has a $2 transaction fee..)

So while I don't think that verion .82 is the answer, its an short term solution to a bigger problem that has to be fixed, so I support the effort if for no other reason to keep bitcoin viable while it is growing in adoption. If you kill the small transaction market, you lose a big market of potential users.

The min fee has been lowered many times of the history of Bitcoin.  It was never $2.00 (USD equivelent) at any point in Bitcoin's history.

The min fee on low priority txs is ~1 US cent and the dust threshold is ~0.5 US cents.   What small transaction market are you talking about?

The point of consolidating dust is that it is the same premise as the penny jar. If you use multiple wallets, various transaction identifiers, etc, etc - You always end up with small amounts of bitcoins left over. If you consolidate them all into one wallet (AKA - the penny wallet), then one day you get a free cup of coffee.

It doesn't address any big issue, but there was a previous post about how to deal with small bitcoins left over in various wallets so I was sharing what I have done with mine.


That doesn't do anything.
[/quote]

Agreed. The low priority txs is still acceptable, but if bitcoins value was say $1000 USD then a fixed threshold would represent an ever escalating minimum fee.

Summary: The minimum fee needs to be adjustable and probably the best way to accomplish this is via an open market solution - let the miners who are processing the transactions set the fee.

Miners do set the fee and as a result the min dust threshold (54.3% of min fee).  The min mandatory fee is simply a default and is used to protect the network from denial of service attacks.  The default has been lowered four times in the history of Bitcoin to keep the min fee (on low priority txs there is no min fee on high priority txs) at a low level of around 1-3 US cents.

I honestly don't have an issue with the fee as I have never had the need to send a transaction worth less than 10 cents.

This is precisely what Gavin described in his "State of the Coin" speech at San Jose, and in the pull request on GitHub for 0.8.2.

It's not necessary to convince anyone that this is what should be done because people are already working on implementing it. This entire thread is about to be rendered moot.

Heh, no longer have to hate on 0.8.2...

News: Bitcoin-Qt 0.8.3 has been released. Download http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.8.3/ (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.8.3/)

I hereby boycott 0.8.2! Going with 0.8.3 instead.

The only fix was an issue being complained about in a recent thread. Hopefully the author was happy.

In 0.8.3?  The fix is a vulnerability an attacker exploited on mainnet to crash several nodes,.

What if tomorrow the devs again decide to raise the minimum limit? What will happen to earlier colored coins?

There is no set minimum only a default.  Lower the min fee to relay setting for your node (default is 0.1 mBTC in 0.8.2) and you lower the dust threshold (54.3% of prior value).  If enough miners and relay nodes operate with a lower value it doesn't really matter what the default is.  However the trend has been that the min fee has gone DOWN (in nominal terms) over time due to the deflationary nature of Bitcoin and the rising exchange rate.

So true. Sadly, most people can't comprehend that. If bitcoin suddenly traded at $200, the dust threshold could be reduced by half, because the minimum fee drops by half. It's just about balances.

You have your minimum fee for accepting a transaction (1 mBTC default).
The dust threshold is just 54.3% of that. Basically anything under 0.5 mBTC won't be verified.

Corrected your post it is 0.1mBTC.  If a node still relays it (either because it has set a lower min fee or it is running different code) and a miner includes it in a block the transaction and block will still be accepted by the network.

Oh thank you for your correction. Just a question, do miners pull transactions from nodes to put them in solved blocks? Or are miners essentially nodes themselves. Never really got around to understanding that.

Miners are simply a node that also happens to create and publish blocks.  In the earliest client all nodes were mining by default as the client itself had a built in miner module which ran in the background. Miners in the context is the entity designing the block.  So called "pool miners" are merely hashpower suppliers.  Miners learn about new transactions the same way any other node does, they receive a message from a peer node.

So where is my 8.1.<doss resistance> patch ? I'm all for boycott but plz provide me the tools to support your boycott ....  ::)

0.8.3 is available.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.8.3/

Your missing the point of 0.8.2 boycott, ofc 0.8.3 contains the changes made in 0.8.2, the same changes he wanted to boycott in first place ...

I think you under estimate the power of defaults.  Nobody changes the default, and no one was ever going to change the default. 

This is a consequential change, because one of the key qualities of bitcoin is divisibility.   This change shatters divisibility.  Colored coin people also suffered, but they are a minority.

The gain was that all the spam from satoshi dice, which is considerable, was lessened.

It's all about pros and cons.

In my view this was satoshi's project, and now it's gavins.  Huge shoes to fill, but he's done a great job so far. 

We should however be vigilant over future changes, in a reasoned way, and I think that's exactly what the core dev team want to happen.

No.  The recent dust change did not target SatoshiDICE.  They increased their payout on losing bets immediately, demonstrating this.

The recent dust change addressed the people who were dumping megabytes worth of data, such as the full contents of wikileaks cables, into the blockchain.

Change one line here:
main.cpp:55:
int64 CTransaction::nMinRelayTxFee = 10000;

Build binaries.  Make said binaries publicly available.  Accept the market's decision.  Anything else is just pointless bitching.  In open source software, disagreements are resolved through action, not words.

exactly the reason. DUST

0.83 is out, you may want to start boycotting 0.83 as well :)

Regarding colored coins. In my own personal view i dont see them as "bitcoin" they are a system built upon bitcoin that seeks to use it for its own purposes that are not strictly aligned with the concept of *this amount of bitcoins is worth this*. As a result i dont think its the devs responsibility to cater to a system that uses bitcoin for its own purposes at the expense of bitcoin itself. Regardless, there is no reason why colored coins cant continue to exist and function with a higher value and a larger amount of bitcoins.


The people that understand the issue regarding dust, know why this change is needed. The people that are against it, I dont think they understand the issue and as a result are not in a good position to judge whether or not its a good choice even if they think they may understand it.

But let me try to clarify some stuff.

Divisibility as far as bitcoin is concerned means how many decimal places to the right you can go. This aspect of bitcoin has not been altered in any way. the definition of what makes a non standard transaction has been expanded, to cover what is referred to now as 'dust' outputs. Dust outputs, are not able to be spent as inputs for the recipient, without significant fees AND/OR wait time due to how the fee structure works, and has always worked(1), this is why we want to block 'dust outputs'. Fees have changed over time but have never been configurable client side. now with this update its lower then ever before and is configurable client side, with the value of dust being a percent of whatever you set the fee to. If by divisibility you mean 'its unfair i cant send half a penny, or 1/10th of a penny or 1/1000th of a penny.' Then you should be informed that you can if you connect to a node that mines them. But the recipient will still be saddled with large fees AND/OR large wait times, Regardless of whether this change happens or not.(1)

(1) this is partially negated by a pool ignoring certain rules for what is considered spam on the network, Which would allow anyone to simply flood blocks with garbage if they want unless they implement their own set of rules as to what they think doesnt belong in the blockchain.

The bottom line, bitcoin is a complex system that as we all knows requires a great deal of understanding to fully grasp. This change is needed.

So I am guessing most upgraded their clients to the new version?

Looks like 0.8.3 introduced a double spend attack

ftp://ftp.inf.ethz.ch/pub/publications/tech-reports/7xx/789.pdf

No, however from passively paying attention to what clients are being used, it seems to always be a slow process unless its a fork issue or security issue. With all the fuss about this update i would imagine it to take longer then normal, but the list of users for the different clients show a steadily increasing adoption rate  towards 0.8.2 atm. Perhaps most users arnt paying attention to the forums and just update when they notice the change or when they get to it. With the new client coming out i imagine people will stop going to 0.8.2 and start going to 0.8.3 instead. hard to say much about the adoption rate and im not an expert lol.

As it stands the ratio is about 1:5(if nobody is running two clients) or 1:4 (if everyone is running both) But who can say whether some people are running both clients or not. I have both installed but am currently only running 0.8.2 on a daily basis.

The page ive been watching daily is http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/branches.html

Nice to see that number steadily increasing.


----

@melvster Ouch, dead link too. Though depending on what it is, Maybe you shouldnt be posting that?

If you read the paper, you can see they are talking about a change introduced in version 0.8.2, not 0.8.3.

Further, it is a zero-confirmation transaction attack, which is already known to be insecure.

Thanks!  Forum inserted http ... im not sure why ...

Good point, thank you for the correction.

People tend to look at things a X is secure, Y is insecure.  The truth is more subtle than that.  There's always just a confidence interval.  Even with 1 confirm there's risk.

Developers will come from the angle of: "zeroconf is insecure, dont do it, and since its insecure anyway, more risk is acceptable" ie buyer beware

Merchants will come from "I understand there's risk with zeroconf, but I am willing to accept some level of risk"

The goal should be to try and increase security where possible.  Perhaps marker coins is one way to do this.

If you want more security use 0.8.2 or higher.  The issue you linked to only affects older clients.  Yes it comes from diffrent handling on non-standard transaction in 0.8.2 (and 0.8.3) but the only one negatively affected is older clients.

Hi,

I don't understand why this is an issue -

If ver 0.8.2 is a problem, why not use 0.8.1 ?

Or someone recompile the 0.8.2 source with the changes you want/dont want ..

As far as I can see, no one has a central authority to decide anything on bitcoin.

The p2p network continues to work regardless of version ..

or am I wrong ?

MK

It is not an issue.  You don't even need to recompile or build an alternative client.  Dust is set at 54.3% of min relay tx fee amount.  By default that is 0.1 mBTC (10,000 S) and thus dust is 0.0543 mBTC (5,430 S).  If you disagree with the default all you need to do is add a line to the config file changing the default minimum relay fee amount to a lower (or higher) amount.

Due to a potential zero confirm double spend attack (which only affects clients prior to 0.8.2) and a memory crash denial of service attack (which only affects clients prior to 0.8.3) "boycotting" the latest client is horribly stupid advice.  Users should upgrade to 0.8.3 and modify their config file if they don't like the default values.

You don't even need to recompile, you just edit a text file and restart.

The problem is that some people don't want you to be able to change how your node acts.  They don't want you to have the option to refuse to relay their crap.

That is the reason for all of the fuss.  0.8.2 puts the node operator in charge of the relay policy for their own node.

Right -

So why does this thread exist ? - Why are there so many posts regarding boycotting
a version ? - Does G.Andresen have some special ability to force the bitcoin network
to adhere to this or that or as mentioned recently no longer allowing very small
transactions.  If I'm using version 0.8.0 can I still make very small transactions ??
or is there some central server which has a global config file that all p2p connections
read and thus now prevent these mentioned small transactions ?

You can control what YOUR node does but you can't control what other nodes do.  If your node can't find another node to relay and another miner willing to mine your small, spammy transactions they won't be confirmed.

People like to speak about the Bitcoin network in abstract as if it is the unified system runnning across multiple computers.  The reality is that the "network" consists of thousands of independent nodes.  You can't force another node to do something they don't want to.  Prior to 0.8.2 other nodes had no way to block dust transactions.  Now they do.

Indeed, keep up the great work devs :D

-Because people dont know what they are talking about. They see a bunch of people complaining and saying the same incorrect thing over and over so they think "they must be right!" this whole thing got started because one of the OPs on one of these threads started spouting crap against it before they even knew what it was, and everyone jumped on the crazy train cause they didnt know better.  "if they are that much against it.. they must be right.. "

-No, he doesnt. His power comes from knowledge. Other people that know whats going on understand and download the updates, if they were bad they would let everyone know. Problem this time, the mob has spoken! and rather then following the people that understand, they are following the ones that dont understand.(ever heard of the phrase, 'the blind leading the blind'?)

-this is complicated, you either
A: Havnt read anything weve said.
B: Read it, but you dont understand enough about bitcoin to understand whats being talked about or the finer points involved.

-this is complicated, you either
A: Havnt read anything weve said.
B: Read it, but you dont understand enough about bitcoin to understand whats being talked about or the finer points involved.

- OK. With that question, that means you either dont understand enough about bitcoin yet or your making a joke.
- With this change the entire network is setup in a way where everyone can choose what they will and wont pass on for transactions, You now have a choice where you had none before.  - What this means is ...

A: As long as their are enough people willing to pass along garbage data and willing to flood blocks with spam, you will still have the ability to waste you bitcoins to your hearts content.

Or...

B: You can be part of the change to prevent people from being forced to waste money because they simply dont know any better.

 (to clarify, were trying to give you the tools to choose whether to free yourself or be chained to high fees. Your begging to simply be forced to pay high fees that will cost you more money then what your sending or receiving).

Super simple and summed up. 
(with clients before 0.8.2)
-Many tiny transactions = super high fees.
(with client 0.8.2 and after)
-By default, it does its best to prevent people from creating transactions that will waste their money, YOUR money.

Ex, (Clients before 0.8.2) I send you 100 pennies one penny at a time, you try to spend it, the required fee is 1.50$  You have to pay a fee of 1.50$ to spend your 100 pennies. why would you want to be sent 100 pennies 1 at a time if its going to cost you an additional 1.50$ to spend them?

I love tacos!

After reading all of this thread, I have come to these conclusions;

1. OP has a valid argument whether or not anyone agrees with him. To continually try to shut him down is rude and butt-ugly!

2. Posters calling him derogatory names does nothing to address the argument or your own reputation. (I know most of you couldn't give a FF what anyone thinks of them but you should)

3. After explaining "why" something is being done it may need to be explained 40 more times because many will not read the thread to have a clue what is actually being discussed.

4. Even if something will make the system better, some will choose to ignore any facts posted by anyone if you somehow seem to disagree with them.

5. It is mostly irrelevant since a new version is out now.

6.I love tacos! (I need to open a BtcTaco stand yes)

T.

I am baffled at the level of ignorance and plain stupidity of the bashers here.
This is the Main weakness of a democracy: how on Earth can you give power to the people when the people is ignorant.
A true democracy is utopic because it requires an educated and a rational population.

I just hope that the knowledgeable vs conspiranoid ratio of this community is not leaning towards the latter, or the economy will implode.

To really stop dust, we need to ensure that *every* miner enforces this policy. How is that going to happen?

Maybe the newer clients should be made to reject blocks containing transactions with dust outputs.

That would lead to a hard fork scenario, developers try to avoid that at all costs.  The goal isn't to "really stop" dust but to simply reduce the viability of creating dust.  If the vast majority of miners choose not to include dust transactions then dust transactions will be less common.  Will it go to 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000% of all future transactions?  No but it will be a lot less than when every node and miner by default includes them because there is no simple, effective method of excluding them.

Simple version:
If a majority of nodes and miners want "spam" then it obviously isn't spam.  If a tiny number of nodes and miners relay/mine spam tx then it will be far more difficult to use these and there will be less of them.  Win-win.

I propose more efficient solution of spam problem.

Don't use hardcode.

Just lets develop ultimate storage which will not give a fuck about spam.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=197810.0

1. It may sound harsh but your solution seems pointless for now.
2. Your 'ultimate storage' grows with more users, but so does the amount of spam produced. It would solve nothing. I like many others would still prefer to store the entire chain.
3. Current fix = limited/no spam.
4. Pruning, would remove all spent transactions that are 2(?) transactions back since they wouldnt be needed, dramatically reducing the size of the blockchain. At which point your solution is entirely moot since anyone could store whats left of it without issue.
5. Storage devices are getting cheaper and larger every day and so is memory. im sure if it were needed at some point in the future someone could build a custom board with a crazy amount of memory on it to store the UTXO set. With the speed memory runs at im sure someone could make a slower, cheaper, larger ramdisks for this purpose.

You answered this by own in 4. 1000s HDD are anyway better than one.

This is good solution, but this breaks chain integrity. And who said spent outputs will not be needed by anyone?


Everybody blindly repeat this following satoshi. But satoshi said this regarding storage space capacity. HDD also have one more very important property which nobody takes into account: IO capacity. Soon, bitcoind will run out of IO capacity of spinning HDD, and later, solid state drives.

I don't propose to discard whole local chain. I propose don't dig it without need on local side.

I know at least one use case where my solution will bring performance benefits.

I know that DHT storage just moves load from disk IO to network IO. But just realize, we have a new block with thousands transactions.

With regular client, EACH NETWORK NODE will have to dig into own local chain and do a key lookup there for each transaction. Thousands or millions of nodes will have to do same hard IO work on each new block.

With regular client + DHT enabled - only few will do this. They will cache lookup results into local DHT cache and answer to others from there. So in this case, only few nodes will perform local chain lookup. Lookup results will distribute along network in mostly cached answers.

As bonus, there will be google-large peta-scale storage for all chain with its glory.a

This really isnt the place for this.. but...

Pruning does not break chain integrity. From my somewhat limited knowledge about it, pruning just removes the body of a transaction from a block and leaves the header and its hash alone. As a result blocks can still be verified. Each client would do the pruning themselves, at which point if no copies of a old transaction are floating around then its safe to assume that everyones client removed it, it was no longer needed. Regardless im more then sure there will be a few complete unaltered blockchains around if anyone needs to look up such data. Perhaps thats something your model would work for.

Regarding IO capacity of HDDs, i cant say because i dont know. But it doesnt seem to be a problem yet. I also think there are more pressing issues.

While torrent like storage of data does have its benefits i dont think its solving anything that cant already be solved. To be honest, what you want to use it for sounds nice, but im not sure if its workable or even needed. The thread you pointed to doesnt contain any of this information your talking about, and im not going to go look.

Maybe you should write up a paper about it and see if you can get the devs to look at it and tell you if your going in the right direction.

This is good place for this, since I'm sure this solution also will solve spam problem. But its primary point is to build scalable, distributed, easy-accessible block chain. I'm sure if it will be built, its capacity will allow to don't take attention to any spam.


I absolutely don't accept any items in chain to be abandoned. Its a history of evolution. All items in chain must be stored and accessed easily from any point of Internet. This is the main point of DHT storage: scale chain and make it easy accessible. As secondary benefit I see disappear of spam problem (disappear not spam, but problem) and ability to run full chained client on any cheap or expensive hardware.


This. I do know what is IO problems. They hide for a long time and appear instantly choking project in bottlenecks. My primary work is to build distributed storages for heavy random IO operations. I know what is when SATA HDD allows only 10 MBit/sec throughput on random reads. I ask you, all don't put the whole network load on one regular client!


Probably yes. I will develop one.

As an success example of stopping spam to be a problem - look at Google BigTable.

Has YouTube problems with spam? No.
Does it care about single video to be re-uploaded thousands of times? No.

Bigtable consists of millions cheap servers with regular SATA HDDs. I want this to be implemented in Bitcoin. It will make Bitcoin very powerful and scalable and stop spam to be a problem at all.

All your examples are highly centralized services.

If you want to build something decentralized, that is difficult to shut down or game, then it will look different than those examples.

Bigtable was not built to check for cheating in those millions of cheap servers :)

@Pent and Lucif

This thread isnt the place to discuss projects that dont exist in any form. If you want to suggest your thinking regarding it, may i suggest you start your own thread, and if its that important just link to it from here. While conversation is mostly dead in this thread, id still call this off topic.



Your project doesnt solve the spam problem. 1000 PCs or 1 PC, if you allow spam its going to fill the bockchain with sludge that we cant get rid of. Regardless! reducing spam at the vary least reduces the blockchain size, according to your model that would reduce the amount of space required on each users computer across your distributed network, which we all know is a good thing regardless of whether were talking about bitcoin in general or your project.

The blockchains main purpose is to be a decentralized list of all bitcoins in existence and what address they belong to. It does not serve the purpose of 'storing what amount belongs to who' by perpetually storing old data from old transactions that are no longer relevant to the users. If you wanted to make a project to store the entire blockchain for those that might want it, Go for it. But it doesnt need to be the single main feature of bitcoin and it is far from sustainable regardless of the model used.

Congratulations on your ability to quote and bold something i said in plain english for all to read while at the same time failing to address the issue with exception of you giving me your assurance it will work.

PS. If your really serious about this project then you really need to write something up that has sources for information.

Is posible working with this program in a old computer (if dont have a video card)???