Bitcoin Forum

"Transaction spam" is the largest issue threatening the fledgeling currency called Bitcoin. A brief synopsis of the problem:

"SatoshiDICE" notifies gambling addicts of losing bets by sending them a transaction containing 1 satoshi back to their original address. A regular transaction fee is also included in this transaction. The problem is that this produces an unspendable and unprunable output. The output is unspendable because it is so small that it would cost more in fees than it would to send. It cannot be pruned because it has to stay around in fast storage to detect double spends, even though ironically it cannot be spent (developers, let me know if this description is technically accurate).

The immense volume of SatoshiDICE transactions crowds out regular transactions, driving up fees for normal users. This would almost be okay if SatoshiDICE was bringing in new users to Bitcoin in proportion to its increased transaction volume. But most of these transactions come from automated bots running 24/7 spending tiny amounts of Bitcoin. Miners have a love and hate relationship with this transaction spam. They love the fees, but hate that they need to store every one of these transactions on the hard drive, FOREVER. They cannot be pruned since they are unspent outputs. But what's the real problem?

The problem is that SatoshiDICE is taking advantage of the early stage of Bitcoin, at a time when transaction volume is too low to fill the blocks and bring fees up to a level that would make up for the drop in subsidy. If Bitcoin was fully mature, it will not be vulnerable to this type of transaction spam and no one would be talking about it let alone suggest patches, because fees would make the dust spam economically unviable.

We do not have a mature network, and we're in the bootstrapping phase. SatoshiDICE is consuming the "startup capital" (current state of low fees, high subsidy, and lots of free space in blocks) to profit without bringing a corresponding increase in growth of Bitcoin adoption. The simple fact is that a relatively small handful of gambling addicts and bots are flooding the block chain with 70%+ of its transactions.

What can you do to help?

* Put pressure on SatoshiDICE to stop the transaction spam. The principals involved in SatoshiDICE are Erik Voorhees, Roger Ver (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131608.0), and Jon Matonis (board member and secretary (https://bitcoinfoundation.org/about/board) of the Bitcoin Foundation (http://www.bitcoinfoundation.org). See a conflict of interest?

* Show your support (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=101902.msg1598818#msg1598818) in asking the MPOE exchange where the S.DICE security is located, to de-list the security until the problem is addressed.

* Appeal to the S.DICE shareholders (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=78.0) to pressure MPOE to de-list S.DICE.

* Ask BlockChain.info (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40264.msg1598857#msg1598857) to remove the playable direct links to SatoshiDICE from it's wallet service as a courtesy to the network

* Vote Jon Matonis off the board of the Bitcoin Foundation at the next election.

* Apply suggested patches and updates to your client or mining software to protect the network.

With your help and the rest of the community we can work together to see Bitcoin through this fragile early phase on to see the next generation of cryptocurrency and digital payments!

Thanks

It can _technically_ be spent it's just uneconomical to do it— the marginal cost (fees/lost of priority/etc) of including it in a transaction will be less than its worth. If you pruned it and then some smart alec went and spent it (costing himself coin in the process) you'd reject the chain and end up on a fork, which mr. smart alec might find profitable indeed (e.g. if you were a competing miner or a victim he wanted to attack).

I think calling the amounts "unspendable" is not technically correct - provided an unspent output is old enough even one that contains a single Satoshi can be spent (at least that is the case currently AFAIA).

> Put pressure on SatoshiDICE to stop the transaction spam. The principals involved in SatoshiDICE are Erik Voorhees, Roger Ver, and Jon Matonis (board member and secretary of the Bitcoin Foundation. See a conflict of interest?

I'm a lifelong member with regrets at having joined but for the fact that Gavin gets paid. It's the only reason I didn't press for the return of my bitcoins.

Email them if you're so inclined:

For Press Inquiries

    Executive Director Peter Vessenes: peter@bitcoinfoundation.org
    Secretary Jon Matonis: jon@bitcoinfoundation.org

Individual Member Class Questions

    Secretary Jon Matonis: jon@bitcoinfoundation.org
    Chief Scientist Gavin Andresen: gavin@bitcoinfoundation.org

Corporate Member Class Questions

    Vice Chairman Charlie Shrem: charlie@bitcoinfoundation.org
    Board Member Mark Karpeles: mark@bitcoinfoundation.org

Legal Questions / Contact

    Chief Counsel Patrick Murck: patrick@bitcoinfoundation.org

General Questions

    Assistant Director Lindsay Holland: lindsay@bitcoinfoundation.org

Refrain from playing SatoshiDICE, since you cannot win long-term.

Pressuring SatoshiDice is a band-aid, not a solution. The Bitcoin system is supposed to work, we're not supposed to ask people to do us a favor and not use it.

To solve the problem of unprunable small outputs, we need some form of output upkeep costs (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=80435.0).

This would be taking action against a problem who is only a problem due to how to network currently operates. If you remove SDice from operation, another company will take its place. We should be happy that SDice has made this flaw apparent and take action not against SDice, but at the source rather than the "cause".

We're not asking them to not use Bitcoin, we're asking them to stop exploiting a temporary weakness for personal gain. Especially when a principal is a sitting board member of the Bitcoin Foundation.

Out of interest, how high do you think the fees would have to be to make their 1-satoshi transactions economically unviable? It strikes me that these guys are making out like bandits doing what they're doing - fees would have to get seriously high to break their (simple and apparently unbelievably profitable) business model. If you think a "mature" Bitcoin is going to price these guys out of doing what they're doing, it's going to price a lot of other uses out as well - probably to the point where we need to give up and go back to the drawing board.

Elsewhere, I brought up the issue of consent. I didn't consent to host a gamebot's traffic when I run the client, I was consenting to hosting Bitcoin's traffic. If Bitcoin traffic is now a subsidiary of SD's load, perhaps SD can be persuaded to start its own blockchain and stop taking advantage of the implied consent of others on this blockchain.

I doubt that SD can be shamed into stopping what they're doing but perhaps some users of the network can be persuaded into not giving them anymore business.

We will end up with a bloat chain problem sooner or later even with 1 MB limit. For now, and to buy the developers some time, I suggest a 0.1 BTC minimum bet on all bets or GTFO. That should reduce the amount of bloat. I had my TX wait for over an hour last night, it wasn't very fun.

Actually I think this can be calculated from the "max bet" in the 1dice address. For "lessthan 64,000" the max bet is 500 so the fee would have to be a little bit under 500...so yeah the fees would have to be quite high! Unless my math is off.

As has been said many times before, trying to block SatoshiDice transactions is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

If it's not SatoshiDice that's generating "transaction spam", it'll be something else, and then something after that, and so on. Are you going to launch a new campaign against each?

Also, it's ignorant to vilify the very individuals (Erik Voorhees, Roger Ver, Jon Matonis) who, by their tireless evangelizing, are probably most responsible for making Bitcoin as popular as it is today. If you hold any bitcoins and are enjoying their current value, you owe the aforementioned a debt of gratitude.

It's a good point. This campaign is only an interim measure until robust technical solutions are rolled out. These solutions should not single out SatoshiDICE but rather, focus on the undesired behavior (unspendable low value transaction outputs). This will solve the problem network wide instead of just fixing it for one vendor.

If a small website that 99.9999999% of the world population don't even know about is causing a problem for Bitcoin, then what hope do we have. You don't fix a problem in a p2p payment network by politely (or impolitely in this case) asking them to please stop. That's, of course, assuming that this even IS a problem. I agree with Mike. They're the only site that's really testing the real world (as in wide adoption) stability of the network.

If SDice is considered an attack on Bitcoin, Then Bitcoin itself is flawed.

EDIT: I will add, I cannot for the life of me understand why people are willing to play a negative EV game, with a currency that was worth $13 2 months ago and $42 today... It defies all logic. 

Uh-oh, uhoh has a good point.

I didn't "consent to host" a pot smoker's traffic, so we should figure out a way to block Silk Road's transactions.

I didn't consent to host traffic for a site selling adult toys (http://www.bitcoinin.com/health/sexual-wellness/adult-toys/), so we should block Bitcoinin.com's transactions.

I didn't consent to host traffic related to adult content, so we should block transactions from all the porn sites.

I know somebody that is a luddite, so out of deference to him we should block transactions from electronics resellers like bitcoinstore.com.

I've never used SatoshiDice, but I'm not sure I like vilifying certain types of transactions. That said, I wouldn't mind if SD could figure out a way to lower their load on the network.

Well put. What's the point of this whole experiment if we're just going to pull a VISA and block any entity we don't agree with.

Fantastic OP. I agree 100% with it.

Don't forget that even if SD starts internalizing all its business, like Mt. Gox and other major sites, that SD-clones could kick-off at any time and do similar long-term damage to Bitcoin.

The solution is employing even smarter anti-spam filtering for miners which reduces this type of transaction flow to a maximum percentage of "normal" flow, at most 50%, probably a lower target, perhaps 20% is best.

source?

Currently it is hearsay.

If the network can't handle the load from SD then we should all just pack it in and go home.  You ain't seen nothin' yet.

What is your source on Jon Matonis owning SD ?

This topic is a good reason for bears to be bears.

How about a solution like this. A transaction can include outputs that anyone can spend, without requiring a private key to unlock; let's call them "free" outputs. So, the smaller any single output is, the more free outputs the transaction must have, with each free output equal to the standard transaction fee.

Obviously the free outputs will be claimed by clients that relay or mine the transaction. Some clients might not relay the transaction if all the free outputs are already taken, therefore in the interest of propogation, a single relaying client will not be tempted to immediately claim all the free transactions.

However -- I'm not sure about a technical aspect of this. Suppose I send a transaction with two free outputs. The first relay claims one and leaves another blank. The transaction is then mined, so the miner claims the second. However: could the miner also *erase* the claim on the first free output, and insert a new claim on it?  In other words, can the original transaction be derived from the one in which the first free output is claimed?



An alternative solution is this. At the moment, the fee is TXFEE * TXSIZE, where TXFEE is 0.0005BTC and TXSIZE is measured in kB, right?  And the fee must be applied if: a) the priority is low b) TXSIZE > 1 or c) any output < 0.01 BTC. How about changing the fee to:  TXFEE*TXSIZE + SUM_{OUTPUTS<0.01}(TXFEE*log2(0.01/outputvalue)).  Let me explain:

TXFEE*TXSIZE is the same as before.

0.01/outputvalue = 1.0 if outputvalue=0.01
                        = 2 if outputvalue=0.005
                        = 8 if outputvalue=0.000125
and so on.

log_2(...) = 0 if outputvalue=0.01
              = 1 if outputvalue=0.005
              = 3 if outputvalue=0.000125
and so on

So, for each output below 0.01BTC (threshold which depends on bitcoin value, currently ~$40), every time the output halves in value, the transaction fee must increase by TXFEE.

So, a 750Byte transaction with outputs (0.5, 0.01, 0.009, 0.001, 0.00000001) will require a fee on the last three outputs only:   TXFEE*[log2(0.01/0.009) + log2(0.01/0.001) + log2(0.01/1e-8)] = TXFEE*[0.15 + 3.32 + 19.93] = 23.4 * TXFEE.

As you can see, the 1 satoshi output really costs alot of fees.

The problem is that this will merely make the transaction more expensive benefiting the miner - it will not reward non-miners for having to store, relay and validate the output (though that might be impossible anyway).

Are you for real ? What is difference between transfering 1 bitcoin and 1 shatoshi for netowork?, there is no difference .... If for bitcoin network, one web page is problem then better sell all your bitcoin now, if bitcon become global suces 99.99999% transaction will be done in Satoshi.

LOL
Bitcoin value for me is pricless now please put it in code....

Would be reviewed periodically by developers - much like the transaction fee, now at 0.0005BTC. If bitcoins jump to $100 or $200, the minimum transaction fee will probably be reduced to 0.0001BTC. What I mean is, with fiat currency, there is a minimum transaction - $0.01.  Actually, in Canada, isn't it CAD$0.02 ?  I gather some European countries don't even use €0.01 coins anymore.

So the devs would introduce a minimum recommended transaction output of 0.01 BTC. According as 1 BTC buys more and more potatoes, the minimum transaction should be reduced accordingly. In any case, the minimum transaction output should ALWAYS be greater than the minimum transaction fee, so that these spammy outputs can always pay for their own redeeming and be eventually pruned.

@fergalish

Su you are saying lets start giving specific individuals powers to control aspects of Bitcoin and change things as "they see fit"....... remind me again why do we believe Bitcoin is different than the other crap outthere?

- Edit, Just noticed you mean periodically change the "recommended" fees. Sorry that would be totally okay IMO.

If he can spam Bitcoin network that means its a vulnerability. Vulnerability that needs to be fixed.

It is pointless to "put pressure" on anybody. On the contrary, its good that somebody shows us what needs to be improved. SatoshiDICE is not our enemy, just an opportunist using an opportunity.

If ever governments decide that they don't like Bitcoin after all, SatoshiDICE will be the least of our problems. A real enemy like that will use any means possible (including spamming the network) to harm BTC.

So perhaps let's grab this opportunity to harden the Bitcoin protocol instead of complaining.
.
.

+1

I've never heard of anyone except evorhees being involved with SatoshiDice. You should really be careful with throwing names around like that.

Is there a particular reason fees higher than the transaction value are allowed?

What about imposing this:

Smallest output must be at least 10 times the fee.

It would always ensure that it is possible to spend output, thus allow pruning.

What a load of nonsense. I myself do not care about SatoshiDice at all, but seeing people making a drama about it makes me itchy.

First, it's your subjective opinion what is "spam" and what is not "spam". Miners voluntarily include transactions they want and voluntarily accept blocks from other miners. They account for their storage costs themselves without asking your opinion. If the disk is scarce for you, do not store the whole blockchain. My phone disk space is valuable for me, so I don't keep the whole blockchain there. Maybe I should complain to the Pope or Mr. President that there are too many transactions out there for my phone to handle?

Second, it's your subjective opinion regarding the "maturity" of the network. For me Bitcoin is not even "beta", but already proven and working protocol. You may disagree, but I don't see how my opinion should block your transactions and your opinion should block mine. It's up to actual miners and every other single user to decide whether to verify/include/relay/store/prune transactions. And everyone will decide for themselves individually. I may prune some transactions from the blockchain, you may choose to have block headers only. Or we can store random 1% of all transactions and download more only when needed from the peers around.

Third, "startup capital" does not exist. As does not exist any "common good". Good is always evaluated subjectively and individually. There is no "society" entity acting on its own. It is just a name for a bunch of people acting in their own self-interest. SatoshiDice consumes only the resources that somebody is willing to sell and others are willing to pay for. There is no "danger" whatsoever. You are basically calling for censorship based on your personal preferences, disguising them under "common good" myth. This strategy is very dishonest and reminds me of shitload of propaganda that is poured on every single person all around the world for the last several thousand years.

Because we are to free block things we dont like. We are in this together.


But, doesnt this news mean we could use a few more nodes? With seven billion people in the world, the total amount of transactions needed can be averaged out, even taking the "spam" uses into account.


One of the more higher-ups than me, who is probably a member of the Bitcoin Foundation, said the blocks need to be made bigger and started telling folks to change settings and to reject some traffic.


Whatever we do, lets fix this. If more nodes will work, lets do it, if rejecting some traffic that is unacceptable to the community will fix it, lets do it. If we are all washed up here, :) and there really is no problem, lets find that out as well.

The problem of unspendable outputs can be fixed with dust collection algorithms in the clients.

With every transaction the coin selection algorithm can check to see if any dust outputs can be included as an input without causing the transaction to require a higher fee.

Right now, the whole fucking Bitcoin network is plausibly deniable money laundering  ;D

Miners are the ones with the voting power here. Specifically, that voting power is weighted based on their ability to quickly download blocks and transactions, solve blocks, and then push the blocks out to the network. Right now, this is based on their hashing ability. If the blocks start to become too large because of transaction volume, it could take minutes instead of seconds to push around all that data over networks, which would impact the speed of solving blocks. If the fees aren't high enough, the miners may decide to start pruning out transactions in order to gain a leg up on the competition. AFAIK, we aren't there yet, except for a few pools that don't include SDICE transactions.

I don't think we have a real issue until the average fee that the miners demand for inclusion in the blockchain becomes too large for most of the users on the network. The likely reaction to that would be for specific applications to move their traffic onto internal networks, which would take some load off the blockchain. If the network became too fractured, then obviously that could be a potential flaw.

And if you want to block transactions going to/from SDICE, you really ought to be convincing the mining pools to reject them or charge higher fees, since they are the only ones who can do something about it.

I don't see the problem. Raise the max block size limit and problem solved.

SDice is only sending so many txns because it's cheap. When it becomes expensive, they'll stop (or find some other creative way to do what they do). People will use the blockchain however they're allowed to. All you're saying is that you don't trust the design of bitcoin to handle this stuff and you want a centralized "solution" to something you don't like on the network.

Go use fiat.

Sorry but thread title is misleading.

Exactly. This whole thread is complete bullshit and waste of time.

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/23492480.jpg

Right. There is an attack, but it's originating from the OP.

If you read the post, then you understand that these outputs can never be realistically spent, since they would cost more in fees than the amount received.


Again, you do not understand that these transactions cannot be pruned. They must exist until the end of time, and yet the outputs cannot be spent.


No. The maturity can be measured objectively as the average fill rate of blocks (currently at roughly 25%).


The block subsidy is a temporary incentive to reward miners as the system bootstraps itself. It also exists to handle the problem of the initial distribution of coins (Ripple developers take note). The "startup capital" refers to the current condition of low fees and lack of competition for space in the block chain.


No, I'm saying that we don't need fees to go up sooner than necessary just because of one bad actor on the network.


If your proposed change was to go through, an attacker could cheaply flood the network by first creating a lot of dust, then sending it to himself, and finally creating many transactions that spend the dust as an input using the lower fee.


The transaction volume wouldn't be a problem in the future since we will regularly reach the 1mb limit. It's only a problem now because the network is young. But the transaction volume is only one part of the problem. The other part is the unspendable.

Every time SatoshIDICE sends a losing bet transaction, every current node and every new node must keep a copy of the transaction until the end of time.


Raising the max block size would make the problem worse, since even more SatoshiDICE transaction spam would be permanently etched into the block chain, with no possibility of getting spent.

Misterbigg, first of all, let the programmers solve it (you have no authority on the matter)
Second, please stop spreading fear and panic
Third, banning *anything* will be the end of bitcoin

When did I ever suggest we "ban" anything? You're thinking about someone else's thread and patch. I never said ban.

You're right that developers need to address the issue. But for now the best us non-developers can do is try to raise awareness and use social pressure to encourage the actors on the network to act in it's best interests (although I concede that might be a long shot).

Neither Roger Ver nor Jon Matonis are principles of SatoshiDice.

I would point out that pruning doesn't have to be binary.  It can be probalistic.

For example the active transaction set could exclude all spent outputs and all unspent outputs below a certain threshold, it could even exclude very old outputs.  Essentially the active transaction set is acting like a cache and using probalistic functions to try and balance resource requirements vs cache hit rate.

If a transaction is created which uses an output not in the active set then the details could be fetched from the full unpruned database.   If is even possible that some nodes wouldn't maintain this locally and simply query other nodes by sending the tx id and requesting details.

SD inefficiently uses a critical resource.  Basically it comes down to you either believe in free markets or you don't.  If you really believe in free markets then the market will solve the problem of inefficiency.  More valuable transactions will crowd out SD ineffcient use of the resource.  SD will adapt either by raising min and thus collecting same revenue using less of the critical resource, or by moving transactions off blockchain.    If you don't believe in free markets then Bitcoin will fail eventually anyways.  SD isn't a problem, Bitcoin is.

Personally I believe free markets are the most efficient allocator of resources (including space in a block) and thus SD isn't a "problem" long term.

With fiat, $0.01 is the minimum transaction because that is the smallest unit created.  In Bitcoin the smallest unit is 0.00000001 and should be able to be spent just like a penny, but it is uneconomical because of the way Bitcoin is transferred you usually have to pay a txfee.  If you are just discovering this, you need to go back and read some more.  With that, you can still send Bitcoin without a txfee, good luck getting it included in a block though.  I used to send Bitcoin all the time without a fee and it was usually always included in the very next block.  The problem is not Satoshi Dice, the problem is that Bitcoin is still being developed and tested.  I think this needs addressed by the developers and is not so much of a problem now, but will be in the future if adoption and price continues to rise.   

That all being said, "can" Satoshi Dice do something about this to help the network short term? Yes.
Would it cut into their profits? Yes
Will they do anything? Probably not...

The developers will address the issue and as we both know are already well aware of it. Your "raising awareness" is just your attempt to create FUD. Asking the actors to act in the network's best interest is the wrong approach. In the short term, a better solution would be for pool operators to detect this "abuse" and voluntarily decide to not include these types of transactions (matching this pattern) into their blocks rather than just "banning" certain addresses.  

Its economically unfeasible to spend a Satoshi today (and that affects pruning) because a Satoshi is less than the current standard transaction fee. No shit. That doesn't mean that it always will be. Guess what happens if the block size is never raised? It becomes economically unfeasible to spend a mBit or uBit because the transaction fee rises (in BTC) and a BTC's value drops (in USD or whatever). That makes this exact problem worse.

Your motivations become more transparent by the day.

So who gets to pick who gets to spend what they want however they want? Just because YOU and HIM don't like SDice means they don't get to use bitcoin??

I have an idea. How about you go print your own fiat and regulate all you want. If you're worried about SDice wasting satoshis or the blockchain getting large then you don't understand bitcoin. Neither of these are a "problem". Stop fear-mongering.

If anywhere this should be solved at the protocol level, not at the social level. The bitcoin system should be completely agnostic about the intention of a transaction.  All it should be concerned about is the total cost of a transaction, both to the miners and relay nodes.

If people start using patched clients to block transactions based on perceived intentions, we are going to get into a huge mess.  Players like Satoshidice are going to start obfuscating their intentions, resulting in arms race, and before long there will be collateral damage, and innocent people who's transactions look like their intention is X,Y and Z are going to have them blocked.

It's going to be a bit like the old financial system. After some players misbehaved, government introduced rules like 'trading X with the intention to speculate is prohibited'.  Of course, this didn't stop traders from speculating, it just encouraged them to repackage their financial instruments to make it look like it's not speculation.  

These intention-based rules only make the financial system more complex, less transparent, less fair, and less stable.  We really don't want to do the same to Bitcoin. Let's keep it simple please!

Bullshit.

Not every user of the network is acting in its best interests. On the contrary: there are and there will be many people who will try to destroy the network or simply use it for their own means / their profits without caring about how this affects other users.

We need to be prepared for everything, not whine around because somebody is using a known vulnerability. Vulnerability needs to be fixed and that is end of discussion.

+1

This is so obvious I'm astounded that people keep parroting SD as a "problem."  Let's say I shut down SatoshiDice tomorrow, has Bitcoin gotten stronger? More resilient? More impressive? More worthy of global commerce? Here's what would happen:

1) People would see that Bitcoin was so vulnerable that one of its leading advocates had to shut down one of the most profitable Bitcoin sites because the Bitcoin network "couldn't handle it."  Perhaps it would make it into the press with the headline, "Bitcoin too weak to support one small gambling site"

2) Bitcoin's usefulness for mini- or micro-transactions, or even "numerous transactions" would be abolished. There'd be significant in-fighting over what constituted "microtransactions" and "transaction spam."

3) Any other person or company could and would create new services (like SD or totally different) that also creates many transactions. The "problem" would then be back, perhaps much bigger. Any "progress" gained by exiling SD would be very swiftly lost.

But at least Luke-Jr, misterbigg, and their cohort of whining babies would be happy because they "saved Bitcoin"  ::)

You guys have restored my faith in the forum community, very well said :)

I think that's going a little too far. How about just not sending dust to notify losing bets?

this.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. SD is a business model which is viable because it kinda enjoys a free ride. The moment gambler's have to spend 50% irreversible fee on a 50:50 bet, they're going to say, WTF.

So in essence SD competes only with a zero-transaction fee market. I have no problem with miners using social criteria on a zero-transaction fee market, because it's altruistic anyway. (also note the distinction between propagation vs. validation, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149668.msg1600289#msg1600289)

After reading OP all I have to say is....da fuuuuuuuuuq?

I think I might just through a few bets into SD just to cleanse myself from all the FUD you just posted.

That would reduce the SD transactions by about 25%. Will that satisfy you and solve the "problem"? Or will this discussion flare up again when SD grows by a subsequent 33% a month later?

It's true that SD isn't a problem long term but as of this very moment, SD transaction spam accounts for upwards of 80% of all transaction volume. There is so much of it (likely due to betting bots) that it is driving up transaction fees. Eventually fees will go up anyway but we don't need fees to increase so much yet. The block subsidy is more than enough to incentivize mining. What the SD transaction spam is doing is prematurely raising the costs of transactions at a time when Bitcoin is in it's early stage and doesn't need the burden.


Yeah, I don't think anyone is disputing that the vulnerability needs to be fixed but until we have a robust technical measure in place that discourages the bad behavior (instead of just blocking any address that starts with "1dice") I think that raising awareness is the best we can do. You're more than welcome to propose solutions in the Development and Technical Discussion forum.

That's only true today. Maybe in the future a bitcoin becomes divisible to 16 places. Either way, who cares?


So what? If disk space is a problem for you, don't run a full node. I have 10x the current size of the Bitcoin blockchain available on one thumb drive I got for $30. And guess what, it turns out that storage gets cheaper over time. Crazy huh?



We should be thankful for this "bad actor". He is helping to understand how to deal with a larger issue by working within the system as it currently exists at a stage that is early enough to correct the problem.


Yup, that's how Bitcoin works. So what? SD paid a transaction fee to do that.

Again it's not the volume of transactions that is the sole problem, it's the unprunable and unspendable outputs that are sent for losing bets. They will be carried around in every copy of the block, in perpetuity, and can never be realistically spent (since it would cost more in fees than the actual amount).

The volume is making fees go up in the short term which isn't the best but that problem will go away as we get more "legitimate" transactions. But the unprunable and unspendable outputs have a permanent effect.

OP, thread title is VERY misleading...go take some prozac.

This is not "raising awarness". This is whining like a crybaby, and spreading unnecessary panic & chaos.

No, it's not how Bitcoin works. When you send an ordinary transaction, it's outputs only need to stay in the block chain while they are unspent. After someone spends the entire output, it can be pruned (removed from disk). Until that point it needs to stay in long term storage. Single-satoshi outputs would cost more in fees to send than the amount of the output, which is why no sane person would ever spend such an amount. For this reason they effectively can never be pruned.

I'm quite sure the paypal network won't even stand a chance to handle the 1/10 load from Nasdaq exchange

I never understand why a game with lot's of bot's transaction should use the world bank's transaction network

You keep saying this no matter how many times someone points out that it isn't true.

Someone please ban this mrbigg troll

Yea, it is how Bitcoin works. That's exactly WHY it works. Bitcoin is a protocol. Pruning is a client implementation. Does this make pruning techniques less efficient, yup sure does.

It's not a flaw, it's competition complaining about the competition.

The best way to resolve is to increase competition.

I see SD as a anti-monopoly service. It will prevent mining consortiums from dictating their fees. They will try to do it never the less but the less greedy will gladly take less.

An extended backlog of confirms will ultimately have to lead to voluntarily reducing of difficulty through consensus. Find the 'sweet' spot.

Adapt or perish.

kinda reminds me of the nuclear waste debate. It's a future liability which is not captured by current transaction fees.

Would a simple change to the propagation rule fix this problem: ?

do not propagate if:
fee > unspent transaction output.

This would prevent satoshi-type unspent transaction outputs, unless they are introduced with zero fees. And those should be filtered out heavily in a transaction fee governed market. (Although such a rule would probably have collateral damage for other valid transaction models, e.g. colored coins)

I fully agree, it's also great to see smart people like you having an influence. Bitcoin is the greatest invention mankind has made, and it will eventually free us from oppression, people don't realise it yet. Bitcoin's essence should never be touched.

All this bitching makes me wanna spam the blockchain myself, just to point out that removing SD is no solution.

Yeah good analogy. It's exactly like nuclear waste.

Your suggestion is a good one; However, it is vulnerable to miners defecting. It would be in the short-term best interests for an individual miner or pool to just comment that line out.

Well at least it would be simple enough to quickly fix the code and maybe offer it as a command line option - and probably has a huge impact. Then SD needs to fix their problem...

But before implementing that, is there any conceivable reason why somebody may want to send a transaction where the fee is higher than the unspent transaction output (colored coins aside)?

Bob Loblaw (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwWAsNZTnug) is that you?

Wait, hold on.

You're saying one satoshi outputs are "un-spendable."

I think this is not true.

Whenever you spend coins, the inputs are not required to come from a single source.

Let's say I have an address where my balance is 0.01 BTC.

However, for whatever reason, every single transaction that was sent to that address was a single satoshi.

Would that bit cent be un-spendable?

I don't think so.

The transaction would just have one million inputs.

This transaction would definitely be *huge* in size in bytes compared to a normal transaction, but it should still be valid.

It might take a really long time to get a confirmation as well, since I think it'd get a really low priority due to its low amount sent and high size in bytes.

This beats the Shi% out om too....? I mean maybe lotto with a devaluating currency just for fun....the only explanation can be

[1] evolutionary logic short circuit of gamble pleasure outweighs rational odds, and this is osrta what the human race had to do to get a head be able to understand they would most likely die but do the experiment anyway, until one you could find a way to make it work, or a least shut out all possibility, a curious mixture or being able to reason something out then ingnore that reason....this sort thing may drive a AI attempt crazy

[2] they though BT was going down, or will go down

new title:

come on this is pure FUD

Did you sell your coins and would like the price to drop now?

They are not technically unspendable but economically unspendable, because they cost more in fees than the amount that is being sent. No rational actor would bother to transmit a 1-satoshi amount. Except for SatoshiDICE of course, since it is using the blockchain as a cheap "messaging service."

How do you not see that this is a problem with the Bitcoin protocol and not SatoshiDice?? You are focusing on a symptom instead of the disease. The analogy of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is relevant.

The devs need to fix the protocol issue, if there is one. I'm happy to donate funds from SD to assist the devs in this endeavor if that would be helpful.

Yes, I agree that this is currently a vulnerability of Bitcoin and it most definitely needs to be resolved. A simple solution is not so apparent. You're quite well versed with Bitcoin intricacies, can you propose a solution? But in the meanwhile, wouldn't it be helpful for SatoshiDICE to cut down on the spam while we get this thing fixed?

Just because Bitcoin has a weakness doesn't make it right to exploit it for personal gain.

There's an ocean of difference between doing what's right for you, versus doing what's right.

Unfortunately I am not well-versed in the technical intricacies of Bitcoin, and I'm not a programmer. I have huge respect for those who are, and thus I'm happy to contribute to their work by donating some money to assist them. If developers come to me and say they have a good solution, I'll fund it.

Next, I'm not convinced that there even is a weakness. Bitcoin seems to be working beautifully, and already many are thinking about how to scale it even more. These are the growing pains of such a system, and is a sign of surging strength, not weakness. So I do not see that SD is "exploiting" anything... rather it's simply using Bitcoin, following the rules, paying more transactions fees than everyone else combined, and demonstrating to the world how awesome Bitcoin is for gambling.

Yes, SD is profiting from this, but so is the Bitcoin system itself as adoption grows and these growing pains are worked out sooner rather than later.

SatoshiDice is a spark which is driving interest from the entire gambling industry into Bitcoin. Certainly it puts stress on the system, but a system that's used is a system that's stressed, and the Bitcoin economy is far healthier for it.

We cannot advance Bitcoin by asking anyone who is putting stress on the system to "please refrain." I do not think Bitcoin is so delicate and poorly constructed as you. It can handle SatoshiDice, it can handle far more than SatoshiDice, and I congratulate and encourage everyone else out there who is building infrastructure and putting stress on this system.

So far there's been no comments in this thread by actual developers, which is not unexpected because such threads are not very likely to converge on any kind of rough consensus for a technical solution. 

This is because actual developers hang out this this forum instead https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pulls simply because that forum is almost all "signal" and this forum is almost all "noise" from their perspective.

MisterBigg, being a competent C++ programmer that I know you to be, simply submitting a sub-10 line pull request to alter the logic to prioritize transactions unlikely to ever be economically spendable with clear explanation of its logic, test scenario, etc would actually have about a 1000 times more chance of actually making a difference out there in the "real world" of code ... rather than in this talking shop of bitcointalk.org.

Cheers ... :-)

I'm 100% positive that the value of my bitcoins has gone up because of SD's success and interest from the gambling industry that has come from that. So you've made myself, and everyone else who has bitcoins, money. And you've helped us to understand issues that need to be dealt with in the protocol. Thank you for that.

this.

isn't micro transactions a feature in bitcoin? send small amounts low fees unlike credit cards?

using bitcoin to make a provably fair casino? seems to be a perfect match

if 1 in 100 million people in the world using satoshi dice kills bitcoin there is something wrong with bitcoin

(not a player or investor in satoshi dice but this just seems like common sense)

You are right. Programmers rule in the world of software money (bitcoin).  Thanks for the link and more impetus to learn programming.

The also hang out in #bitcoin-dev IRC channel on Freenode

Yeah when we talk small amounts we're talking about pennies, or maybe a fraction of a penny like 1/10 of a cent. But 1 satoshi = $0.00000045. Is this really useful?


Yep, I agree and there is no question that SatoshiDICE has done some great things. But they are also pushing a burden of disproportionate costs onto all full nodes that exist or will ever exist in the future. No other Bitcoin enterprise behaves this way.


I wouldn't say that it is going to "kill" Bitcoin but it is definitely make running a full node more expensive, and in a way that doesn't grow the Bitcoin user base in proportion to its cost. It has also been driving up transaction fees, again in a way that doesn't really help the network.

All that SatoshiDICE needs to do is pick one of several options for changing the way it sends unspendable outputs to notify gamblers of losing bets. There isn't even a problem with the winning bets, since those are spendable. It's just the losing bets which have a miner's fee and a microscopic output (1 satoshi). Here are a couple of options:

1) Require gamblers to include a tiny additional deposit of 0.01 BTC which is always refunded regardless of a win or loss

2) Send an amount equal to the transaction fee back to losing bets, instead of sending 1 satoshi.

3) Stop sending betting loss confirmations

If you pay any attention to what the developers have to say, you realize that Bitcoin is still not even full release software, it is in beta. The current version is 0.8. It was said that we will probably get up to 0.20 (zero point twenty) before we have a 1.0 release. There are still many to-do items before they consider Bitcoin to be at a level where it is ready for the masses.

It does Bitcoin a disservice for SatoshiDICE to place the network under the constant load of it's unprunable transaction spam in it's current beta state. Sure, if you want to think of it is as doing us a "favor", then okay they flooded the network and now we have some hard data. So, can SatoshiDICE please turn the spam off for a few weeks while the developers get things sorted out? After they make the necessary fixes then SatoshiDICE can turn it back on. That's being a good citizen during the beta stage.

u can spend them, wait some time (so they arent "new coins" anymore, dunno how many blocks that would be) and send them even with 0 fees trough the raw tx API.

misterbigg, a good level-headed and polite summary

I certainly am not against SatoshiDice as a business or in principle, there are just a few simple house-keeping changes which would be a MAJOR help to bitcoin. Erik loves Bitcoin so I hope he takes these comments on-board.


There IS also lesson for the devs, because SD shows a potential attack vector which a malicious Central Bank (for example) could use to choke the Bitcoin network for long periods of time.

Maybe everyone should stop using Bitcoin to help out the miners at this early point of Bitcoin's evolution.

We can start using it again once we have enough transactions where this problem will not exist.

I don't see why these are unspendable? Couldn't you just have more incoming bitcoins land on that address, and then spend them as a group?

u could, but the TX is getting big and you would have to pay a higher fee for it, altough u still can do it for free. scroll up or click here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150493.msg1601755#msg1601755

If you can send transactions for free, is there any reason you would not be able to send a big transactions with a reduced fee?

Just wondering: Is the size of the bitcoin transactionss cumulative, or does it reset after each transaction? What I mean is if I take a bunch of small amounts and send them to one address, that would be a big transaction, but if I then send the coins from the one address to somewhere else, does that also make a big transaction or does it become a small transaction because it is from only one address now?

Okay, you'll have to forgive me if my technical analysis is incorrect but I believe that when you spend an aggregation of coins, there needs to be a separate input coming from the chain of each separate coinbase. That means that when you combine the single satoshi with some other coins there will be at least two txin (I think). The problem is that the extra txin will incur additional per-byte transaction fees which can only be greater than the size of the input (1 satoshi in this case).

It seems that no matter what you do, the added fees required to process the single satoshi will always be larger than one satoshi. Considerably larger, even a 10 satoshi output cannot be spent.

In fact I believe that SD changed the amount it sends from 1 to a small random number between 1 and 5 because some of the mining pools dropped transactions with just one satoshi output.


Free transactions are only relayed or included in a block if the coins are of sufficient age, to prevent attackers from flooding the network with messages.

i once did send a TX which was around 53KB if remember this correct with 0 satoshis as feed, i could have set the fee to 0.0005 and it would still work. altough u would need to use the rawtx API, otherwise u cant do that.

+1 for MisterBigg's last post

So for the currency who prides itself on being "cheaper than credit/debit" you foresee and look forward to when transaction fees are so high it is actually prohibitive to high volume usage? Bitcoin is a neat concept and I'm enjoying learning about it/getting into the whole scene but reading some of the stuff you guys post makes my head hurt. I'm not sure half of you understand the concepts you hold in such high esteem when talking about the benefits of bitcoin in the first place. Seems like most of you are having trouble reconciling the fact that basically everything which helps bitcoin reach its worldwide goals actually hurts you as a single user of low financial power. You will be the same ineffective actor that you are in the fiat world because people who are more skilled and have grasped more power and made more money will push you to the side just like they do now. The vision you all seem to have of how this Satoshi "problem" should be handled is a not-so-free market once it negatively impacts you or you fail to be the one benefiting from a position of advantage over others.

Just keep hitting the reset button until you land on top right? I mean statistically it has to happen sometime huh? No, probably not.

So if someone wants their 1 Satoshi they can just send it as a free transaction. Once it is of a sufficient age they will be sent.

Problem solved.

Yeah for a 1-satoshi amount it would have to age for one or two thousand years. During that time, every miner that ever lives has to store a copy of the transaction even though it can't be spent.

Plus, by that time nodes will no longer relay free tx because miners wont include them in blocks (since there's no fee). This will happen well before the subsidy drops to zero.

misterbigg +1 for discussing this important issue in peaceful, patient and respectful way.

Title is a bit misleading though, but attracts much attention  ;)

And btw, it's hard not to notice, that HDDs capacity growth rate significantly decreased last years. As far as I remember, the last HDD I bought, I bought in the first quarter of 2010. It was a 2Tb HDD for about $100. Now, 3 years later, price of a 2Tb HDD is about the same. And, well, we have 4Tb ones for $300. So, I wouldn't count now on incredibly cheap future storage space.

Those, who don't even know, that low priority transactions pay fees proportional to their size (in kilobytes) should rather read more and post less.

out of curiosity... is a reason why they wouldn't fix this because they don't think people will want to go through an extra step in creating an account, then sending funds to their site to play with?

As far as I understand, the system now is provably honest to certain degree.
It is still possible to do some fraud IMO. Lets imagine we are SD. We want people to see, that on average say a 50% bet wins in half the times. But still, we can do some bets from our own speciall addresses which always win, therefore we are able to decrease winning rate for normal gamblers.
Correct me if I'm wrong.

The thing is that when you lose at SD, you lose twice. First you lost the bet, and second you have to pay good money to get rid of the SD spam dust.
But I guess this will never be fixed, because Erik has too much influence on TBF and as a result on Gavins work. And with those ever raising profits he can already pay Gavin with pocket change from SD.

Satoshi Dice is helping to drive the price of Bitcoin up.

Pros....cons...

Once hedge funds can funnel cash through Coinlab starting on March 22nd, THAT will become the price driver ... all this retail coin tossing around won't matter

This is definitely a flaw.  The BTC protocol should reject any output less than the block's tx fee, or the median tx fee for the last 60 or so blocks.

You see, you don't really know what you're talking about and that's leading you to draw the wrong conclusions.

If I have other coins, say 4 BTC, and want to spend 1.25 BTC, it's trivial to create a transaction with 4 BTC + 1 or more single-satoshi inputs, that pays 1.25 + 2.7500000x BTC change as outputs, and pay no fees.

So not only can they be spent, they can even be spent and pruned for free.  Yes, I've done it myself.

Good point. But an SD gambler is likely to have some thousands of single satoshi outputs. How much time it will take to spend them this way? It's like a pool with two pipes. Through one water gets in, through another gets out. And it will always be more water getting in than getting out.

you have a missing incentive structure. A gambler doesn't care about the technological implications of dust output. His main concern is economic.

To get a fee of 0.01 you need at least 10^6 satoshi inputs. So there's no economic incentive. The only thing which would help is an intelligent client which "sweeps" the satoshi output and throws it in as a fee. However, as pointed out before, in a crowded blockchain, that little bit of required extra space may cause another important transaction to be left out, so there's no free lunch.

Overall transactions which have no intent of being spent (for economic or other reasons), pollute the blockchain. We need an incentive structure to discourage that - or at least make it expensive to do so.

He's paying the fee implicitly becauser SD are paying it!  And they're making money.

Further, your mega-gambler has to bet right?  Each bet can take a prior losing satoshi, so even a gambler with a lot of bad luck needn't be building up the satoshis.  Think a little bit, this is a non-problem.

Yes the standard client software might need updating.  I mainly use electrum which makes it easy to specify what outputs to use, but any client updated to spend dust is all you need, and adding such logic is very easy.

First of all your trick only works once, if the 4 BTC come from a transaction output that is sufficiently aged. So it's not "free", you're consuming the limited resource (old coins in this case). You could not, for example, use the same 4 BTC again to combine another single satoshi input for "free".

Second, assuming that you did not have aged coins you would have to pay a fee. The 36 bytes for the additional input (the 1 satoshi) will drive the fee up by more than one satoshi. This is what we mean by "economically unviable to spend."

+1

I'm not against SD activities at all.  Did'nt play SD, because mathematicaly, it's a lost over time.  I dont care if peoples/bots are using SD.  If not SD, few other could take their place.  It's just pointing out an issue that must/will be resolved.

Always search for solution in regards to the source of the problem.  SD using the network is'nt the source of the problem.  The Bitcoin have to be upgraded to cope with the scaling up that is incomming.  SD helped Bitcoin by showing this scaling issue soon.  It's best like it, as it gives us time to find a solution, in a civil way, to an issue that is nice to have : Bitcoin must adapt to higher volume.  Is'nt very nice issue to cope with already ? :)

I'm confident that we will arrive to a very good solution, for the best of the Bitcoin futur !

Meanwhile, I've increased max block size of the full node I run since late 2010 !

Happy life to all :)

I'm okay with that, at least we get some peace during the time in between and spare us the block chain bloat even if temporarily. And if the developers fix it before another company takes its place, all the better! But the idea that "it's okay if I do it because if I didn't, then someone else would" is morally bankrupt.

I'm all for libertarian ideals but they can only work when actors behave ethically. Sure, someone who finds a severe security hole in theory has the "right" to reveal the information right away, the "freedom of speech" to tell everyone about the flaw, but the morally correct action is to follow vulnerability reporting best practices. Inform the developers, and then after sufficient time has passed to fix the defect, reveal it to the public.

I hope this example makes it clear that even if we have the opportunity to do something, it doesn't make it right.

What exactly is wrong with this "bloat?"
Blocks won't go over the size cap, so it's fair to clients.
SD is paying enough in fees for miners to accept, so it's fair to miners.
Speculators get slightly richer from lost coins and increased popularity.
The only people who are worse off are other senders because they now have to pay a market price instead of tips.

Isn't this what we signed up for? Transaction fees go up, subsidy goes down?

Yes, that's the currently agreed ruleset.  So what's the problem again?

You've gone from saying they can't be spent, to they can't be spent for 6 hours?  Come on.  And not every bet is a losing bet.  And you can spend 3 or 4 satoshis at a time.

No, you can easily get a total of combined inputs and outputs of 6 or more without raising the cost from free.  Have you looked at what's happening in the actual blockchain, or the logic for free transactions?  And if you're paying the 0.0005 "minimum" anyway you can get away with a lot more inputs and outputs.

Everyone who has accepted the spirit of Bitcoin wants a new, peer regulated currency independent of central-banks and civil-liberties-crushing government control. The next thing is they want is for Bitcoin to take some market share from the existing fiat dominated world.

Applications like SD are generating new business within the Bitcoin domain, business which could never have existed before. This is fine to a degree, but this new, internal, business is not replacing general fiat usage or taking market share from paypal or mastercard, yet it is close to 70% of Bitcoin's transaction flow. This means that only 30% of Bitcoin's processing is replacing existing real-world fiat&payments. Even this might be fine, but Bitcoin has a finite capacity at the moment, the max block size, and a further unknown block size limit which is set by the network block propagation latency and verification time (remember, only 10 mins between blocks).

There is a potential risk, which looks to me a big risk, that SD-like applications will grow to consume nearly 100% of Bitcoin's capacity. At that point the "improve the world" dream will be on life-support. There is also the problem of unspendable outputs bloating the blockchain.

We are asking that SD optimize itself to at least buy some time.

When did the spirit of Bitcoin tell you which applications are most important? Some of my dreams involve weird new inventions that weren't possible before, why should they take a backseat to direct conflict over occupied territory? If we both want the same shared resource for different ends, bidding on it seems like the fairest way to resolve our disagreement. Who knows, maybe provably fair gambling is the "killer app" for Bitcoin.

That "bloat" when maxed out will increase chain size linearly, while the cost of storage goes down exponentially. It's really an anomaly of young bitcoin that we had blocks below the cap this long - for most of bitcoin's future, the blocks should be nearly full.

You most likely wouldn't send 1 satoshi by itself. One of the free-bitcoin sources has been sending 1-satoshi payments. I combine them with mining income and other income with my CheapSweep script (google this forum for the thread). It can take a few hours for the transaction to get accepted, but I've not had one not go through yet.

And I thought Bitcoin was a fiat-killer, the most powerful idea for the internet since the WWW.
I do hope some other people share this view...

My thought too.  As long as things are predictable I'm not terribly worried.  At least in terms of bloat, and as long as it is possible to be an infrastructure operator without spending huge amounts of money and thus limiting Bitcoin to be reliant on a handful of well capitalized entities.

Seems to me that as long as the community does not choose to fiddle with the block size, the fees will start to take care of SatoshiDice-class problems and it should remain practical for the system to be operational on the backs of a wide class of operators. 

Start monkeying with the block size and all bets are off.  Possibly this is why things are coded as they are?

Those things aren't mutually exclusive. Part of the advantage over fiat is that it's the market - not a bunch of lofty rhetoric - that decides the allocation of resources.

You didn't read. Sure, the blocks are full but the problem is that the SatoshiDICE losing confirmations are unspendable and unprunable. Do you understand this distinction? A normal transaction output stays in the block chain until it is completely spent at which point it is eligible for pruning and can disappear forever. It only "bloats" the block chain until it is spent. Compare this with SD's losing confirmation, which can never be spent economically and therefore can never be pruned. Do you get it now? Why won't it read?

Even with no pruning at all the max chain size still goes up linearly over time. Do you understand that?

Ya, so they stay in the block chain, bloat it, and cause overhead and nuisance.  As long as it is predictable I don't see it as a terminal event.

Perhaps an attacker could use is as a DOS mechanism by deliberately leveraging the weakness at a significant monetary loss.  In that case it probably would be possible to make a fork which a significant chunk of the userbase would adopt (if that is what it took to deal with the issue.)  Or just shift to a crypto-currency solution which didn't have this weakness.

I've explained why this is false.  Why do you keep repeating a falsehood?  Ax(e) to grind?

Perhaps mrbigg has privileged access to non-public information? Perhaps this access has something to do with his job of posting amazingly inflamatory idiotic statements such as

?

In recent times mrbigg has started to troll hard with half-true information, similar to a user which name was a certain greek deity who carried the world on his shoulders...

If unprunable dust output becomes a problem, there IS incentive to include "collecting" transaction in the network - you have a big transaction input, but can prune each of these from your list. Once storing your list is more expensive than block space, you include these transactions. If it isn't, it's also not a problem to store them.

Also, there is a hard cap of 21 million times 10^8 Satoshis. You can do the maths how big the maximum set of pruned unspent outputs can get and this isn't even a VERY scary number (Facebook soon will store more data than that). This is the absolute maximum EVER that can be reached, no matter the block size, no matter how many people attack BTC.

By the way, I'm also pissed that SD is using several gigabytes(!) of my HDD space on my full node and only paying miners for including these (I personally believe there should be full nodes not only run by miners or at a loss) but instead of spreading information that I bend a bit to sound informed or plausible, I'd rather release a "no-SD" patch and maybe even binaries for pools to use. There STILL is no real bitcoin client that is tailored towards miners and their needs, most clients are written for end users (=transaction generators, not transaction confirmers).

Also this issue is not new at all, since day 1 SD has been under attack by people for creating 1 Satoshi bitdust. They didn't care back then and they won't change their operations now that they risk their business. Even the "let's track SD earnings" thread in the dev forum was also partly created to also see how much they bloat the block chain.

All you do with this thread is creating a Streisand effect - every publicity is good publicity...

I bet u r wrong. Some guys say that bitcoins can be infinitely divided.

This requires a hard fork, if you create more than 3 additional digits (smallest unit is 1/100th of a nBTC) you overflow an 64bit int and once this is necessary, I guess there are a LOT of other problems first.

Currently there is also a hard cap of 1 million bytes/block. There are ideas to change that, but as it currently stands these are the rules every block on the network must follow to be valid. Of course in the future BTC could be divided down to 100 decimal places, blocks could be 100GB per block etc. - all these things are (maybe?) desirable or wouldn't change the main idea behind bitcoin a lot, but still currently and without a widely accepted hard fork they are out of question.

How much do you bet?

21 million times 10^8 Satoshis + 1 satoshi more

 ;D

People talk about "old" coins, and "aging" coins, to avoid a fee, but what is the actual meaning of "old"? How long do they have to sit, is it a coupe blocks, a couple days, a couple weeks?

They could hold back those small payments and have them build up until such time as the receiver wanted to withdraw them.


Ditto on bitcoin is "still in beta" - we are all still "early adopters".

I think this "problem" is only temproary will fix itself when the price for transactions go up.

This could happen when we start hitting the hard limit of 1 MB per block.

Won't the problem solve itself when 1 bitcoin is worth 1 million dollars and that tiny little bit of transaction "spam" suddenly becomes very valuable, and miners lower fees in competition to handle the vast bitcoin traffic?

I'm afraid Bitcoin #1 is already dead. The only questions we should discuss:

1. How long can we pretend that everything OK?
2. What is the plan for moving on to Bitcoin #2?

3. When its price is going to crash? Deads in the water didn't use to be so expensive.

This is a re-post of my comment from the other thread.

I am not sure why no one has mentioned it here.  But starting today, Satoshi dice already changed its method of sending out 1 satoshi for confirming losing bet.  Instead, they are now sending out 0.5% of bet amount back for losing bets, regardless of bet size.  Given that minimum bet is 0.01 BTC, now all Satoshi Dice losing bet tx starts at 5000 satoshi and up.  I presume that SD changed its policy due to the introduction of SD filter patch.

Therefore, Satoshi Dice now absorbs all tx fee, and return 0.5% of bet amount, even for minimum bet.  Previously, it will deduct a tx fee first and send you 1 satoshi.  So you need to bet at least 0.2 BTC or so, to get 0.5 mbtc back.  But now even 0.01 BTC minimum bet gives you at least 5000 satoshi back.  I presume the change is made today because of all the heat and the patch here.

When? When most of traders realize that Bitcoin has a serious flaw.

If you plan for it now to happen in 20 years it does not need to be a hard fork if 99.9% of the clients have been updated to expect it. It is not as though there is a current need for something smaller than a Satoshi. Also if you are worried about performance problems, I would bet that by then the ALU in your watch can do native 1024-bit int arithmetic operations.

How much are you willing to bet and whom are you allowing to escrow this? I'd go with up to 10 BTC against this statement, if it is formulated properly. Your move!

It's based on the number of blocks. I'm not sure about the actual number but I think it's on the order of weeks. The reason that age matters is to prevent relay spam where someone just transfers one satoshi back and forth between two addresses without a fee.

Hallelujah!!! Can you point me to a tx in the Blockchain and help me understand the outputs and how to verify this? For example:

https://blockchain.info/tx/6e0092ec8abca3ec3df5edbdf4c759024554d8e43c2f1956a3248fe1e6e664f6

Is this a new losing bet confirmation?

FYI 5,000 Satoshi is still considered dust by developers.

Yes, that's a good example of new losing bet confirmation.  There are plenty more at SD's website under Results or Unconfirmed.  You can observe the betting action of the owner of your tx sample https://blockchain.info/address/12AKJqjcwX85gaV4veHQFm4ZbsWD1hNPPAf (https://blockchain.info/address/12AKJqjcwX85gaV4veHQFm4ZbsWD1hNPPAf).  Notice how SD is now confirming losing bet by sending back a flat 0.5% of bet amount, without any fees deducted upfront. 

As for 0.01 BTC size bet, they are typical for the really low odd bet like "less than 1".  But most of SD action is taking place in the 48% to 50%, with some in the 24% and 36%.  So most of betting size are larger than 0.01 BTC.  Though obviously people who run bots or martingales would still use 0.01 BTC as standard starting bet, but typically the tx fees would simply kill you over time except for those betting on the really low odd bet, like "less than 1".

Okay so there has been considerable improvement?

If you want my honest opinion, unfortunately no.  In fact, I expect the betting with Satoshi Dice may pick up in the short term since SD has effectively reduce the edge for the house, i.e. net payoffs to the gamblers has increased.  So instead of 1.9% edge for the house, those who bet the minimum amount now only have to deal with a 1.4% house edge, if SD does not lower the payoff of a winning bet in future.  

You will notice that the betting with SD has actually slow down/stablize despite recent influx of new Bitcoin users.  So by increasing the payoff of losing bets, it has slightly reduce house's edge, and this may renew gambler's interest, as gamblers always love a low house edge.

Of course, not having to deal with thousands of unspendable 1 satoshi input is a big improvement for the gamblers and miners.

Alright well, let's recognize that there are two problems here:

1) Increased S.DICE transaction volume without a corresponding increase in Bitcoin adoption (likely due to bots)

2) Economically unviable transaction outputs which cost more to send than the amount they transmit

As far as #1 goes there is little that we can do about it, and there is a strong argument to be made that we shouldn't do anything about it. Eventually Bitcoin will have to handle this volume anyway. The problem is that it is driving up fees sooner than expected, which could dampen Bitcoin growth. In the short term this is the bigger problem.

But #2 is the larger long term problem, because the outputs are unprunable and they will incur an ongoing storage cost for all full nodes.

It sounds like #2 has been addressed is this the case?

+1.  In a net shell.  Why flood the network with shit? (Dust is just not a strong enough word) . It's a waste.  Keep the fees make more BTC on the losing bets. Win-Win. As a miner/user that's my vote.

TC

I think it still could be a problem if it is worth it to someone with deep pockets to attempt to destroy or manipulate Bitcoin at the expense of buying all or most of the transactions.  (And man would such a bidding war between parties for whom money was little of  no object would certainly be a windfall for miners.)

But, as I said, as long as the long-term damage from caked on dust is predictable and limited to a known and acceptable level I don't see this form of attack as a show-stopper issue.  Floating or vastly increasing the block size would just make an attack of this nature cheaper and that much more likely to succeed.  At least in causing long term damage to the Bitcoin solution.

edit: add missing word.

Yes, let us focus on Satoshi Dice and make them change their ways so that we can ignore this "flaw".

Meanwhile, to drive the price down so someone can buy a bunch of BTC, they can flood the blockchain with tiny transactions and make it "bothersome" for miners.


I am not a miner and have not been following them, but has there been some huge uproar from the miners saying that they are super bothered by all of the tiny transactions? There are ASIC machines coming out that can do 60 MH/s, are they going to be worthless because of so much "dust"?

I have not seen a huge exodus of miners fed up with the amount of traffic.

The flaw is miners neglecting their job to filter out spam. Do you have a solution to force miners to care about Bitcoin in the long-term?
I'm all for better solutions, but so far I've not heard any.

You could make it economical to clean up the mess, which is a better long term solution because it doesn't rely a constant arms race to filter out bad behaviour.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150726.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150726.0)

At least one client developer is willing to automatically clean up those unprunable dust transactions if the right incentives are in place.

Those actually mining are not 'peers' in the supposedly peer-2-peer system per-se.  Transfer nodes are, and yes, there have been an exodus of these due to bloat and overhead.  It is quite possible to render these almost completely outside of the reach of all non-commercial participants depending on how things evolve.  How much of a problem that is depends on where one stands in the Bitcoin ecosystem from a philosophical and/or monetary investment standpoint.

I don't see SD dust transactions as "spam" - a better example of spam would be your insertion of jesus messages into blockchain: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=38007.0

So I should be able to start CPU mining again and make some money?

Let me see if I understand how this will play out. Eventually only very large mining operations will be profitable. They will police each other by agreeing to accept each other's spam-free (or at least within a tolerable threshold) blocks out of necessity by branding (i.e. VISA/MC) their blocks. There will be the temptation to take the transaction fees anyway, but it will be balanced against the speed their blocks will be verified. Merchants that subscribe to mining operations to clear their transactions will prefer the fastest block verifications.

Satoshi dice, thank you for exposing dust output spam vulnerability in bitcoin (bloating unspent tx output data, which is RAM and is much more expensive than HDD!). You have already proved your point, would be nice if you stopped spamming until devs and mining pool operators can act on it.

misterbigg, thank you for raising awareness of the problem and discussing it in a polite manner. Some evangelists keep saying bitcoin is perfect. Well it's not! Bitcoin is still an experiment! It has some design problems that need to be solved. Dust output spam vulnerability is one of them.

Developers and pool operators, please address the dust output spam vulnerability. I personally think that transaction outputs should not be smaller than the fee/kB paid. Additionaly, it would prevent mistakes like https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149926 – a very nice side effect!

Exactly my point. We should THANK them for exposing it - i would rather have SDICE exploit this flaw now rather than somebody else with really bad intentions some time in the future.


No, it wouldn't be nice. If not SatoshiDICE, then somebody will use this flaw in the protocol.
SDICE is putting a pressure on the parties interested (miners, devs) to fix this. So I say don't bother SDICE and let it continue until the protocol bug is resolved.


For the thousandth time: There is NO "problem". Just a bug in the software.

----
Also, OP of this topic is simply spreading FUD.

Bitcoin is not just software, it's also the users who use that software (or ruleset/fork). P2SH change was simple from the software standpoint, but quite difficult because of the social aspect of pools having to agree to upgrade. The fix for this might be as slow as P2SH change. Bugs in societies are much more difficult to fix than in software :)

It's not likely that this "somebody" would ever reach the kinds of volumes that SD have, so it wouldn't be much of a problem if this "somebody" would do so if their operations were minimal.

Second, by raising awareness of the issue, SD, the "others", and the gamblers can decide and do what's best for Bitcoin, since they would only be hurting themselves by harming the network with their spamming.

Yeah the combination of SatoshiDICE's reluctance to change their losing bet confirmation along with Blockchain.info giving them tons of free traffic through direct links from wallet page is a one-two punch to the face of not only everyone running a full node, but any users who have to pay fees (because the fees are higher).

This is hitting legitimate businesses like bitpay or even mtgox directly in the wallet through higher fees.

I'm not saying that gambling is not a valid use of the block chain, nor am I saying that we should block SatoshiDICE specifically from the network. But we desperately need to make it impossible or impractical to send amounts that are below the cost of transmission and storage.

How about SD send the 1 satoshi (or 1000 satoshis) to a common "donation" address instead of back to the sender?

Senders can verify that the donation indeed contains funds from at least one of their original outputs. Also, SD can bunch a lot of such payments into one tx.

Its still a "band aid" until the "problem" (as many say) is fixed.

SD has clearly established, through their refusal to stop attacking Bitcoin, that their intentions are bad - or at the very least indistinguishable from what someone with bad intentions would do.

No, there is no software bug. The bug is in the human component of the protocol.
Satoshi was intelligent enough to recognize that no anti-spam software can ever be perfect or address future spamming techniques, so he designed the Bitcoin protocol to make use of humans to manage the job.
The mistake was that he assumed that miners would always care about the long-term welfare of Bitcoin, and neglected to give them any real incentive to do so. As a result, the bigger miners - who apparently only care about their short-term profits - neglect and/or refuse to do their part in filtering out this garbage.
The only bug here is in these humans - not the software.

The reason SatoshiDICE sends these betting loss confirmation is because Blockchain.info plays a sound when your wallet receives a payment. The cycle goes like this:

1) user logs into their Blockchain.info wallet
2) user clicks a SatoshiDICE betting link
3) SD sends them a loss confirmation
4) Blockchain.info AJAX web page plays a sound
5) go to step #2

If the 1 satoshi goes to a donation address then the player doesn't hear the sound and there's no Pavlovian conditioned response taking place.


Not really because all the dust comes from different places so will require many txin, typically 1 for each loss notification, wherein the fees for each additional txin will be many times higher than the amount sent.

If this really is a problem for Bitcoin, then couldn't somebody with bad intentions use it to try to destroy the network?

After all, it wouldn't cost very much, only the minimal transaction fee.

If that is the case then it isn't solved by just persuading SatoshiDice to stop doing this.

As has been stated over, and over, and over, and over....persuading SatoshiDICE is only one prong of a multi-pronged solution. Of course the other part is to implement technical measures to make the creation of economically unviable transactions expensive.

Why won't it read?

its much more than that.  SD wants and needs to give immediate loss feedback with 0 confirmations.  they do that to encourage repeated and impulsive betting.  they get away with this b/c if someone is trying to do a double spend, the bet tx won't confirm and thus neither will SD's loss notification.

Let me officially endorse this statement.

However, let me also remind everyone that there are legitimate uses for creating dust outputs (e.g. colored coins, contracts). Thus some transactions may "appear" economically unviable, however they there may still be a strong inherent incentive to spent it.

Ultimately what should be the deciding factor is the intent of spending any output at a later stage. One way to give the intent a monetary value is the use of deposits. But there may be other, more refined measures to capture intent in terms of transaction fees. I'd like to see more proposals.

I have been thinking about this and the distinction between spam and virus-like behavior is critical here. Just as your PC/laptop needs anti-spam for email, it also needs anit-virus software for the thousands of more "intelligent" threats.

While the existing Bitcoin mining filters are excellent at transactional anti-spam, they have not been designed for, and tested with, virus-like transactions. SD is showing that this threat is out there. It is doing a huge favor to Bitcoin because anti-virus protection needs to be built-in as well. This would "capture intent" and permit the legitimate uses Jutarul mentions.

From what I hear, SD has already implemented a 0.5% min loss payout, Thank-you Erik! Great news, it helps a lot on the blockchain bloat front.
The larger threat is from external virus-like applications - and this is still out there...

Wow...good luck writing that function! I don't think it's possible to encode this in computer code.

Yes - there is no way to measure intent. But we could resort to game theory to investigate the necessary rules for an environment in which people are encouraged to remove unspent outputs timely.

This is such a terrible bullshit. Can you all please stop creating this bullshit and spreading FUD ?

You simply don't get the point: If the HUMAN behavior is a problem which the network cannot solve itself using its own algorithms, then the network is useless and doomed to failure.
There can be no such thing as human component-based bug in the protocol, because the protocol is designed to cope exactly with that.

Bitcoin is still on very early stages. If BTC at this stage cannot cope with such a minor disturbance as SatoshiDICE currently is, then it cannot cope with reality at all and should be either fixed or redesigned from scratch.

The point in short:
The whole Bitcoin network exists exactly for the reason of coping with human imperfections (like forgery, double spending, thievery and other cons), so if it cannot do that, that means it is *completely useless*.

Did i make myself clear this time ?

+1

Nobody is arguing against that. The point raised by the OP is that the current structuring of transaction fees only takes into account the current network cost of a transaction and doesn't capture the (indeterminate) future cost of keeping that unspent output available.

If you want to understand it in software terms: intentionally unspendable outputs have the same devastating effect as a memory leak. Thus one has to try to either tame them or define a scheme by which the blockchain can be cleared from them once in a while.

Miners have complete control over which transactions they include in a block. They don't need to use the default rules, nor do they need to change the protocol. A couple lines of code could create the necessary incentive to clean up all of these "unspendable" dust outputs.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150726.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150726.0)

Miners have complete control but they also act in their own economic self-interest (just like S.DICE). Cleaning up dust would cost caring miners money:


There is no incentive to clean up dust.

Then let's not worry about it!  Great.

You didn't read. I quoted gmaxwell's explanation for why miners are not really incentivized to clean up dust (hint: it would cost them money).

We do have to worry about it, because the dust makes transactions cost more than their value. I'm not sure I understand your point, do you not get that unspendable outputs are bad?

And you refrained from quoting the explanation of why they are incentivized.

Okay, I have to admit that I do not fully understand the exact mechanics of your proposal. Are you saying that there is a way to financially reward miners to collect the dust? Because that wasn't apparent from your post, and I think it is what gmaxwell was saying. I would love to be proven wrong of course, because this would solve the spam problem in a way that fixes it for anyone who exhibits the bad behavior and not just targeting one company specifically.

+1

MisterBigg being more and more Ignored.. not surprising

The only information that miners absolutely must keep on hand is the set of unspent outputs (UTXO set) because it's possible to allow them to discard all the rest of the historical transaction data using optimizations that have been discussed but not yet implemented. The UTXO set is what some people refer to as unprunable data.

Right now that set is a few hundred megabytes, but if we imagine a billion Bitcoin users all playing Satoshi Dice it would get very large unless there is an incentive for users to limit the number of outputs in their wallet. Especially when the transaction rate is very high miners are probably going to want to keep the UTXO in RAM to speed up verification, which means as the set gets larger their capital equipment costs go up.

So if they effectively subsidize transactions which reduce the UTXO set by requiring a lower fee in the number of outputs is less than the number of inputs they lose a bit in fee revenue but gain in terms of lower hardware requirements.

Once miners start doing this, client developers will have an incentive to include dust collection into their coin selection algorithms and the dust will be cleaned up automatically.

DoomDumas, you might not agree with misterbigg's unconventional cage-rattling approach but he does deserve to be heard. I disagree with him in a major way regarding the 1Mb limit, but I do agree with his concerns about Bitcoin being abused as a messaging system and shotgunned with micro-transactions.

You had a good laugh about Mt Gox choking up earlier this week, as you use other exchanges, but what if Bitcoin itself chokes up? Are you going to laugh about that and load up on pre-mined Freicoin instead?

I am still concerned because people are talking about using bots for SatoshiDice. This would seem a green light for high-volume traffic growth and Bitcoin seizures which would make Mt Gox's choke-up a pause for breath in comparison.

Okay, thanks for clarifying. I understand it now. This deserves a good response but not in the general discussion forum where the lunatics mingle with the sane. I'm going to move this to the thread you started in Development and Technical Discussion.


I'm the first to admit that I've projected a certain amount of sensationalism. But only because this is a social issue. Despite Bitcoin's decentralized nature, there is still a community that needs to act together for the common good. For example, what if we need a hard fork some time in the future?


There's a lot more room for debate regarding the block size, and it's not really a pressing issue right now which is why I have not brought it to the same level of attention that I did with this SD spam. I posted this thread because there was a lot of consternation in bitcoin-dev about the deluge of S.DICE loss confirmations.

I do concede that the block size issue is not so clear cut. There are good arguments to be made on both sides. But there are no sound arguments for keeping the SD dust.


That is a concern but if people want to pay the transaction fees to send economically spendable amounts, there's nothing that we can really do about it, since it can't be distinguished from "legitimate use." In the long run the bots will just drive fees up prematurely but that might be something we just have to accept.

Let's remember that the small txs from SatoshiDice are only about 1/8th of all txs on the Bitcoin network (1/4th of SD-related txs, which are in turn 1/2 of the network, roughly). If SD stopped the loss-bet confirmation txs, you only reduce blockchain usage by 1/8th... and this amount will be re-added to the network within a month or two.

It is a very silly distraction to get in a fuss about the loss-bet txs from SatoshiDice.

OK, thanks for the further information, it is indeed reassuring! And in fact, it is now clear that SatoshiDice is not an imminent risk to Bitcoin because you are monitoring the situation and it is always under your control. The real risk lies in the sudden emergence of one or more of a special type of high volume application owned by people who will not make themselves known to the forum. We can call them Dead Puppy Apps, if i can borrow gmaxwell's terminology here.

Some facts. "DP-involved" means any transaction which has a SatoshiDICE address in either the inputs or the outputs.


There is so much SD transaction spam that it is enough to fill blocks of any size. Can anyone honestly say with a straight face that this is healthy, productive growth?

To be fair, it is paid for by fees which are bigger than all other sources combined, and will get bigger because of the 0.5% change. Which means it is not spam, but a type of high-volume flow which, arguably, Bitcoin is not ready for.

Fees in SD's increased traffic only pays for some of the added costs. Specifically, the SD traffic that produces economically unspendable outputs is not sufficiently compensated by the transaction fee.

As I have said many times there are two components to the SD spam:

1) high transaction volume
2) economically unspendable outputs

While #1 is not particularly desirable since it doesn't come with a corresponding increase in Bitcoin adoption, it is tolerable since eventually we will have to support that volume regardless. What is lamentable is that it drives transaction fees up prematurely but this is only a temporary effect.

#2 is a disaster! This is what could "KILL" Bitcoin, because it disproportionately increases the initial and ongoing costs of mining! And it's not a storage issue. It's a CPU issue, because the bottleneck is in signature verification. Although it certainly increases storage costs (by a small amount).

ECONOMICALLY UNSPENDABLE OUTPUTS are the terminal problem. Not the transaction volume.

Absolutely first-class, A+ rant!  I quite agree and this thread is suspicious in the extreme.

#2 was seemingly resolved/minimized...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150493.msg1604045#msg1604045

I know that 5000 satoshi for the 0.01 bet size is marginal, but anything much larger becomes spendable, surely.

5000 satoshi is below the minimum tx fee for relay of non-aged coins so how could this be resolved? I think SD added this to work around psy's hack.

Would it be better for Bitcoin if SatoshiDice were to switch to LiteCoin instead?

Now this is probably the best question that has ever been asked!

Ok. I just checked on github and based on the latest revision dust is considered < 100,000 satoshi
However, the fx rate is 3 times higher since that was decided, so 33,000 is a reasonable comparison now. So any SatoshiDice bet above 0.07 will not leave a dust amount for a loss.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2100

Oh, I understand this perfectly. But you are not really on topic.

What is this discussion about is:
- Misterbigg wants us, community to *socially pressure SatoshiDICE into stopping generating spam*
- I (and many others) say that this is *bullshit and a pointless waste of time, because network should be designed to cope with that*. And if it isn't yet, it should be. Why ? Because somebody with really bad intentions will start attacking it using this vulnerability sooner or later.

Again: you cannot and will not tell SatoshiDice (or anybody else for that matter) what to do with their Bitcoins.

If they can send spam, then it is a problem of the network. The network should not allow them to do that or it should make it unfeasible/uneconomic. If it doesn't do that, it needs to be fixed.

----
Please, stop spreading your stupid FUD.

If bitcoin can't deal with SatoshiDice, how can it deal with fiat money?

The current fees are there to deter flooding, not to justify it. Even with fees, transactions are still being mostly subsidized by miners.

To use gmaxwell's analogy...
The city has decided that to prevent pissing in an alley, they will impose a $1 fee anytime someone goes into it. The goal is to stop pissing in the alley, and $1 was chosen as a price that wouldn't be too harmful to legitimate alley use. The cost of cleaning up piss in the alley is still at least $7.
Now a bar (DiceBar) opens up next door to the alley. Instead of operating a bathroom, they've decided it's cheaper for them to just add the $1 fee to all their customers' bills as a surcharge, and have customers go piss in the alley instead.
While a few customers leave in disgust at this policy, most of them are drunk (gambling addiction) and go piss in the alley, never giving it a second thought. There are a few who stand up for DiceBar - they say that since the bar is "paying" the fee, they have the right to use the alley as a bathroom.

Any rational person can see how ridiculous this is.

This actually reminds me a lot of the logic behind a large games company never fixing something, when they discover a blatantly abused glitch or bug, their response the majority of the time is to run around banning people and locking threads pointing it out. Instead of just fix it which in the long run would be far easier and make them more money because then people could keep playing the game.

Where the fuck do people get off this logic that making a problem illegal or banning it fixes everything? It seems to be a commonly accepted and wrong piece of reasoning everywhere.

This is wrong way of thinking. Your example is not adjusted to Bitcoin's reality and therefore irrelevant.

Bitcoin network does not exist in the real world, where some social rules (like a fine for pissing in the alley) must be created to stop socially-unacceptable behavior. We are past that.
The Bitcoin network was designed to cope exactly with people breaking social rules.

Paraphrasing your example:
In the Bitcoin world the valley is completely robotic & automatic so therefore no stupid laws are required to make it work. To fix the problem algorithms of the valley should be changed to automatically drive away people trying to piss in it !

Your delusions are not an alternative "Bitcoin's reality", no matter how "idealistic" you try to make them. There is only one reality, and Bitcoin is just another currency within it.
Bitcoin was designed to cope with people breaking (some) rules by having other people filter it out.
While completely robotic anti-spam would be nice, it's not something this era has managed to achieve.

If you think that you can pressure ANYBODY into doing ANYTHING in a world consisting of darknets, peer-to-peer, mathematics, hardcore cryptography, crypto-geeks, ancarchists, libertarians, hardcore goldbugs & deflationists, then it is clearly you who is delusional.

You cannot tell anybody here (including SatoshiDICE) to do ANYTHING. Deal with it.


Wrong on all counts. There are two realities. The "realworld-reality", and "Internet-reality".
I wonder how didn't you notice that before. We are creating a new, better world here. A world where free market without government intervention is created and ensured automatically using mathematic algorithms which are better than stupid social rules, because they cannot be broken easily.

People are always the weakest link in chain and that is the reason Bitcoin exists: to route around human imperfections.


Completely robotic anti-spam is the only way out of this situation.

SatoshiDICE is completely nothing compared to an evil, powerful & determined attacker having hundereds millions of dollars avaiable. So if SatoshiDICE is a problem which cannot be solved using algorithms, that means Bitcoin was a failure from the start.

No. This is your delusion. Even if other nuts share it, it isn't reality.

Then Bitcoin is doomed to fail.

On the contrary, that is exactly what SatoshiDice is.

+1

Bitcoin does not come with a manual or even a contract. Also there is no "city" == central authority. who gets to decide what is morally ok? There are no rules to Bitcoin so everything is allowed.

It isn't reality ? Then we can make it reality. Impossible is nothing.
30 years ago if you asked anybody and told them about smartphones or how today's internet works, they would probably burn you at the stake.

We, the "other nuts" go boldly in the future and fix the world with our crypto-mathematics. If you don't want to be part of it, them I am sorry for your loss.


Last time i checked, there were at least three different possible solutions to this problem presented on the forums, so excuse me if I won't take your word for that.


Then perhaps you should stop wasting time whining around like a crybaby and try to find a mathematic solution instead.
Because your (and misterbigg's) posts are like "OH NOES, SDICE IS GONNA KILL US ALL SBDY STOP THEM OMG OMG OMG !!!!!1111one"

No thanks, as bad as the current governments are, what you propose is far worse.

it is because people are shortsighted

To be clear...  what is that am I proposing, exactly ?

Satoshidice started from zero. It can be easily cloned with little effort.

Sorry, but you are creating this world only in your head.

I doubt, that your bitcoin world will ever find algorithms that stop socially-unacceptable behaviour like...slavery. That "stupid social rules" are everything, that stands between you and and the wild jungle of self interest.
Bitcoin is just another tool, the responsibility of its usage is still with its users.

Ok, I admit didn't make myself clear enough.

What i meant the algorithms of Bitcoin are here to stop people from breaking currency-related social rules like the following:
- Double spending
- Forgery
- Thievery (to a level, when combined with encryption / truecrypt)
- Money creation & devaluation by governments and banks - which is also thievery by inflation

Bitcoin solves these things automatically and internally without using stupid social rules, without the need of central authorities and/or lawyers.

Isn't it possible to currently send transactions with zero fee?
So why are those small amounts "ecomically unspendable"?

Bumping for great justice.

@Luke-Jr:

Would you kindly answer my last question, Sir ? I still await your answer.

"A world where free market without government intervention is created and ensured"

Isn't this kind of what Bitcoin was created for ?
Isn't this kind of what Bitcoin market currently is ?
Isn't this kind of what libertarianism is all about ?

Doesn't that statement make you kind of an enemy of the whole Bitcoin concept (and libertarian spandpoint) by the way ?

You are still with us, or against us, because now I don't exactly see your position clearly ?

No, on the first two.
Libertarismism is not anti-government, just minimal government. And Bitcoin is not the same thing as libertarianism.
I will freely admit to being an enemy of libertarianism. The form of government that seems to work out best in practice is a monarchy.

If you are enemy of Libertarianism, the you are an enemy of Bitcoin as well.
Because Bitcoin is all about libertarianism and crypto-anarchy ?

I don't get it. How come you are even a Bitcoin developer with such views/outlooks ?

No, Bitcoin is just a currency immune to inflation, and easy to use online.
While most developers would probably prefer libertarianism, I don't think you will find any who support ignoring taxes/laws/regulations.

Bitcoin is a perfect fit to enable a tonal (http://books.google.com/books?id=aNYGAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false) currency in lieu of government adoption.
I dislike inflation as much as the next person, of course.

https://i.imgur.com/xZ7QNT2.gif

Bitcoin is a technology and a protocol. If you think it's political, well then, look at the gif again.

OK. I saved this whole discussion on my hard drive so that I can show people what kind of person you are when other discussions arise. I hope you don't have a problem with that.


Oh isn't it ? You are clearly lost and you don't know what you are talking about.

Even Satoshi himself has expressed his political views in the Bitcoin protocol - check it out:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block

----
What kind of delusion are you having guys ?
95% of people (including me) wouldn't even be here if not for Bitcoin special properties making it immune to governments.

If a day comes that social rules can pressure Bitcoin, then I am out the next day (or I will switch to a fork). Why would i let ANYBODY mess with my money ?

The only implied view expressed there is opposition to inflation and/or fractional reserve banking.
Most likely Satoshi held libertarian views, but that's still just his opinions - not Bitcoin itself.

What a coincidence that 95% of people here are trolls!
Bitcoin can never achieve critical mass of adoption if non-libertarians are barred.

Well I think that day was after the creation of the genesis block. Isn't it true, that if the majority of miners decide to accept any kind of rule, they have the power to enforce it?

Let me be clear:

After this discussion I don't trust you. I do not like where you would take this currency if you had the chance. I think you are an enemy.
If some day, by some "unfortunate accident" you become main developer, i will vote for creating a fork without you.


Nobody is forcing non-libertarians to use Bitcoin. If they don't want it, it means its not for them.
Bitcoin is winning exactly because it is lbertarian. Exactly because its free of governments rules & social rules. Without it, it would be nothing.

Anybody can be a miner, anybody can buy ASIC and vote with his own wallet. This is also a part of the free market which is the foundation of Bitcoin.

Good for you.
Centralization on development is the biggest centralized aspect of Bitcoin right now. The more forks the better.

Bitcoin isn't winning yet. I'm not aware of any study, but I suspect most merchants who do adopt it, are doing so because of lower fees.
SatoshiDice threatens the viability of those lower fees, thus threatens Bitcoin's chances of winning.

Nobody is forcing Bitcoin users (or even developers) to be libertarians. It's just you and that bubble you live in.

...and by proposing to socially pressure SatoshiDICE to stop their practices you are threatening the very Bitcoin existence by trying to make it weaker.

Not at all. SD has an incentive to keep bitcoin network operational. SD is not really even stress-testing the network as some people want to say. It is just loading it with stupidly repeating the same one test over and over. If you would really want to test the network you would have first sunday of every month declared as testday and then on that day send 10 times more TXs than what SD does and see how the network copes with that. If it seems that 10 times more is not enough to bring network to its knees then on next month you send more. There would be other kind of nastiness also that should be tested against.

If some truly evil entity like an international banking conglomerate or some botnet hijacking them wants to convert all the millions of computers on its offices worldwide to run some specifically crafted SW that for examples uses all saturdays and sundays to break havoc on bitcoin network then what you might have some load on the network and the bank would not even break a sweat while doing that.

Discussing ways to cope with that could lead to interesting and very useful improvements to bitcoin and I see this discussion of possible ways of improving the network performance and security but we should get over looking at SD specifically and look at the big picture instead. This discussion about SD has served as a useful tool to get people motivated on doing this. They should not be turned down. "Don't rock the boat" is the attitude that see some people having but it only might serve somebody short-term but not anybody on a long term.

From pure technical standpoint I see ShadowOfHarbringer on the right track and I see his political views in this case support the right direction of technical development although the political turn on this discussion was very unfortunate.

On the other hand the technical solutions do not live in a vacuum. If bitcoin is purely a technology and a protocol, then bitcoin is dead. Nobody needs it for anything. Technology and a protocol only come alive when somebody uses them and the need to use them might also be rooted in political opinions. Whatever the need is that should be used as a guide for technical solutions.

Social rules are totally unworkable solution to this technical problem. Go try to enforce your social rules to the international banking conglomerate to stop spamming bitcoin network that they do on specific purpose to destroy bitcoin.

This statement is irrelevant.
Bitcoin is, by definition, a anarchist/crypto-anarchist currency for the simple reason it cannot be controlled by any central authority.

If you want to use Bitcoin, you have to live with it.

So if I use bitcoin I MUST somehow defy all government, never pay taxes (even on my income from bitcoin), don't use any of the governments services and go live in a jungle? (Because for example the roads are also built by the governments usually.) That's just silly.
A lot of people who are using and investing in bitcoin, do it for other purposes than just the hate for the government (like for example for profit). Deal with it.

No, you misunderstood me.

By using Bitcoin you MUST accept that other bitcoiners do that (never pay taxes, defy government) or at least live with that.

Well yes, I definitely accept that. This is exactly my point. Bitcoin is a technology. What political views it's users might have is completely up to them.
Just for the records, I am with you on the fixing the bitcoin instead of banning SatoshiDice, just against this being a political issue somehow.

Yeah, the turn of this discussion into politics was unfortunate, I did not intend it.

as a libertarian i 100% agree with this statement. The form of government that works best does seem to be monarchy. Of course this statement is in no way a defense of monarchy but rather a condemnation of government in general.

You still think of Bitcoin as an "accomplished" system. But what you say about a central authority is still by far not true at the current state of the network. The hole drama was because of asking sd not to fuck a system in development too hard. Just a (maybe naive) try to ask people, who claim to "love" Bitcoin, but blame at it at the same time, that something like they do is possible to do. "Nothing wrong with me, as long as I am not affected".
It was you fear of "regulation" that led to this political rage... Bitcoin is still an experiment, like human society.


Not Anybody. Only those who have the equipment can be miner and not everyone can buy that equipment (at this moment?). The foundation of Bitcoin is the internet, since only there, they can be spent and verified.
I think the MPEx guy said it: Bitcoin is a republic, not a democracy.

Then I say, let's strive for no less than perfection and make it orders of magnitude better than society. Let's make it as hard as diamond and as flexible as chewing gum.

But Luke-Jr says, "hey let's make stupid laws instead which force you into not attacking Bitcoin". And I say this is incredibly foolish.


We can work on that and make it a perfect democracy. Actually, a lot of people is working on it if you haven't noticed.

You could probably save yourself some stress by just clicking "Ignore".

Then i wouldn't be able to straighten out his foolishness.

Luke-jr: Would you ever change any of the core principles of bitcoin:

1) The limited supply
2) The decentralised nature

A yes or no will do, there are no inbetweens to take on that.

atm i only see your foolishness.
i never saw luke-jr saying  "hey let's make stupid laws instead which force you into not attacking Bitcoin". he just made a patch that his(!) bitcoind wont put sdice transactions in his blocks. i dont see any problem with that.

its just the nature of p2p: everybody may just act as he want to... no laws needed. just vote with your mhash ;)

No.

Bitcoin has been "sold" to everyone as a specific limited supply, and without a centralized bank.
Changing either attribute without the unanimous consent of everyone owning Bitcoins would be basically fraud IMO.
If someone wants to experiment with different rules of this nature, they can/should make/join a new altcoin (like Freicoin did).

If you haven't noticed, he is proposing for all of us to put pressure on SDICE not to generate spam.
And i say that is a foolish waste of time which could be spent by thinking out new, automatic ways of preventing spam.

Great! That is much better news... Thanks.

Oh yeah, now less of people will be working on solving the ACTUAL problem which is Bitcoin's suspectibility to spam.

[irony]
Great news indeed it is. Thanks, Luke.
[/irony]

While a monarchy might be an efficient short term government all in all it is clearly inferior to a republic. Power corrupts, thus a monarchy leads to suffering of the people in the long run.

Bitcoin is the opposite of a monarchy - this is one of the reasons I like it. A government should be like Bitcoin - decentralized majority decisions.

Why?
Because otherwise you wouldn't even have a computer to have internet on to ask that question.
How do you want to use bitcoin without a fiat economy? Light signaling? Pigeon post?

Unfortunately this is not how things work in the real world.
The bigger bitcoin becomes the more we get into a situation where majority vote will be the only realistic option because it become more and more impropable that you can even ask everyone for consent, never mind get an answer.

This topic has derailed into politics.

Sorry, i am not in the mood to do politics anymore.

Life gets a lot better when you start using the "Ignore" feature.

Eeh, i was not talking about politics.
I was talking about evolutionary biology.
We, as a species that created aculture that created economy, have created the right circumstances for bitcoin to emerge.
Moreover, bitcoin needs this substrate of existing economy. Without it there would be no bitcoin.
There is absolutely nothing political about it.

That is called ignorance, and is the reason for a lot of problems. It is not a solution. :P

No, that's the point. Bitcoin is already big enough that changing these unanimous-consent things is impossible.

Free association is the only solution.

Thanks, that's reassuring and all I needed to know.  I don't care about your political alignment beyond that :)

I don't know the history of this. It looks to me that he already tried to communicate, but the people in charge don't see this as a problem (and maybe conflict of interest has something to do with it). Now he's effectively demonstrating. Besides the noise, I don't see anything wrong with that, per se.

That I can agree with.

I also want to point out that the timing of this debate is impeccable, given the discussion about increasing the block size limit. Because an increase in block size without fixing the issue of intentionally unspendable outputs will likely increase the exposure to this attack vector.

So this issue has to be sorted out before we allow the network to shift to the next gear.

Please stop assuming that bitcoin was designed perfectly and open your mind to reality. It's a shared resource which is being exploited according to a set of rules.

The correct solution to the street pissing scenario is to give everyone an incentive to clean up their own piss.

Last I heard the miners are being subsidized by the market assigning $1150 to the block reward, even if no transactions are included!

Since "flooding" is being evidenced by "dead puppies" then one solution lies in this approach:

For sources which exhibit dead puppy behavior the fee required for inclusion in a block needs to increase exponentially for each additional transaction

Up front I will say this is a technical challenge, but not impossible, and there are some very capable people here who could take a shot at it.

SatoshiDice needs to keep going so that when a change like above is made it will organically force a change in behavior (which will be SD internalizing or netting transaction flow). Then we can have some confidence that a recognized attack vector is blocked.

What about reducing the current .005 fee and making it mandatory so that you cant actually spend amounts lower than the fee. If it becomes too expensive to send the minimum amount you can always reduce further.

Allowing SD to send tx of .000001 when the fee is .005 is part of the problem.

tldr everyone should pay the same fee rather than variable fees.

Why?

Having an opposing opinion about where bitcoin should go doesn't make him an immoral? In this case it just makes him a skeptic at worst?


Doesn't seem like he's advocating any form of communism, fascism, statism, or pedophilia...

A perfect democracy is hell for minority views.
Grey is the new grey.
Way to go.
 :-\

Well, that also has a downside.
No decisions would be taken even if they were nessesary.
I can't stress enough that any good system has both rigid and flexible parts.
Too rigid or too flexible and it can not work.
In between is a field of stable change and adaptation.

Can we make, at least, some kind of "dead puppies" alarm?

This is the situation. The alarm is sounding already!

(my bold emphasis)

The block 224736 is 1/2Mb, which is the biggest they get at the moment, and it is almost 95% full of SatoshiDice bets.  This type of transaction source is indeed basically unbounded as the number of users it has is a tiny fraction of the potential audience. Further, an uptake of bot usage will alleviate the "bottleneck" of humans pushing a button, ensuring that bets can hit the blockchain at an ever increasing rate.

We just had a monumental debate about the 1Mb max block size limit on this forum, and the significant reason for that debate is that it is a hard fork. Yet the growth of this type of transaction flow makes the hard fork almost inevitable in 2013 whereas it might not need doing until 2015 at the growth rate of all the non-SD business. Needless to say, a hard fork is best executed when everyone has the maximum time to upgrade at their own pace beforehand.

I do not blame SD one iota as they are using functionality as it is presented. There is a weakness which Bitcoin has at present for "flooding" by legitimate fee-paying transactions. The answer is to slowly push back when the loading becomes excessive so that transaction sources have an incentive to optimize.

Unfortunately, a number of people consider this to be the appropriate response:

http://i.istockimg.com/file_thumbview_approve/5010047/2/stock-photo-5010047-stop-alarm-clock.jpg

Can't the bitcoin clients make it impossible to make transactions of less than, for example, 1/10 of a cent worth of BTC.
IMO it wouldn't make much difference for the daily user and the limit can be lowered gradually in steps as BTC rises in value.
Or am i missing something?

That's something miners have to do, basically.
And most of the big ones are already neglecting to care, so good luck with that :/

I thought that the fees would somehow automatically rise in cases of high traffic.
Would not that be the most market-friendly and efficient solution?

At the moment a transaction only needs a fee of 0.0005 BTC, but costs the network ~$.10 in storage alone (for the full duration it's not spent). The fee doesn't go to the network however, it goes to the miner. Miners have the incentive to include as much transactions as possible.

See
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=151329.msg1608087#msg1608087
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=151329.msg1608413#msg1608413

haha bitcoin not flawed look now today is value 48 dollar by end this year 1000 dollar no flaw in this syste just hold value up rich :)

Just get BTCGuild, 50BTC, DeepBit, and Slush to remove all transactions that don't have at least a 0.01 BTC fee attached to them or which don't have at least 0.01 BTC per each output.  The solution is really, really easy and makes miners more money.  Miners have room to be greedy.

Clients will learn real quick to incorporate fees, and SD will learn real quick to stop making these spam transactions.  There's no reason that SatoshiDice just couldn't present the user with a page for each transaction showing if they won or lost, and use up their own server space instead of that of the block chain.

It's not even remotely a problem, the pools just need to act now to preserve the integrity of the block chain.  And I'm guessing we'll see this within the next month or two, and SD will be forced to change its ways.

Miners should care about the policy of the mining pool they are mining for. They should ask for something similar to https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=151335.msg1605900#msg1605900 to be implemented on their pool.

In practice, miners and mining pools don't tend to care for bitcoin long term.

Memo. When the chain fork is resolved and post-mortem out the way, ask gmaxwell how many dead puppies are in block 225430 on the 0.8 chain.

I have to give credit where credit is due. evoorhees appeared in #bitcoin-dev and temporarily shut down SatoshiDICE to make things easier for the mining pools and developers to fix the problem with 0.7 and the forked block chain. I believe this thread has been successful at raising awareness of the issues. It is unfortunate that it had to be done this way but Bitcointalk is a rough-and-tumble place.

Now that all the players are aware of the issues, the noisy replies have overcome the signal, and that SatoshiDICE showed some good faith I think it's time to lock this. Thanks to everyone who participated!