@MtGox

How do you know the Person B you talk about is always the same one? IP address?

Peut-être pas forcement puissance CPU, mais si tu veux avoir de l'émission décentralisée, il faut qu'elle soit très difficile à faire. Tu peux pas avoir une monnaie qui n'importe qui peut créer et qu'au même temps est facile de se créer, sinon tu auras de l'inflation hors contrôle.
C'est pareil pour les métaux précieux, ils sont très difficile de s'obtenir. Il faut y dépenser une énorme énergie et beaucoup des ressources.

Well, the quickest solution to the current problem would be raising the free space, I guess. Say, 3 times the current values... ?

Also, stop picking which transactions to relay based on fees... the transaction memory pool size is another matter*, but at least relaying all valid transactions should be the default behavior. But this I don't know if it would be quick to develop...

*By the way, why should a client which is not mining keep a transaction pool? Shouldn't we just leave it to the interested parties (sender and receiver) to rebroadcast the transactions once in a while if they look like "forgotten"?

It's not up to the client - specially, not up to the default implementation of it - to decide what are "useless" transactions or not. It's up to the miners. The clients should reject only illegal transactions, like double-spending, wrong signatures etc.

The block size wouldn't reach 100MB unless that was really needed. And if it's needed, clients would need to adapt anyway (ligthtweight clients or banks, whatever).
And such increase should be gradual, somebody there in the topic suggested making the maximum limit something like 110% of the average size from the last N blocks. It might be a good approach, in order not to increase too fast.

Anyway, I understand your concern.
Any chances of having the blockexplorer data provided via JSON and/or RPC/RMI/etc? Having an interface like that could make it easier for the development of such lightweight client.

This is not a security hole of bitcoins, Scarecrow. Any sensitive data is vulnerable if not properly protected.

If bitcoins go mainstream, people will just trust their assets to bitcoin banks.

Really? This is bad! It's not up to the client to decide that... at most, relay and then forget about them, but don't ignore them.


No, what I suggest is making such limit adjustable just like the difficulty factor, as a "network rule", not something a user could change. There in the topic I explain more: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1865.0

Can't this code be just separated from the default client?
I don't see a reason to have a miner in the default client anymore... It's useless, since CPU-mining is useless, and besides, things like fee policy for instance are really arbitrary and may change during time. It would be better if the default client was there just to set up the "protocol rules" and nothing more.

Anyway, if we really need to set up a default fee policy, then definitely these free transaction limits should be raised.

By the way, I still think it would be a good idea to make the maximum block size variable, instead of a hardcoded constant as it's right now.


Yes, manual reclaim and manual resending, that should do it.

There's a "default fee policy" implemented in the default client that says that the space for free transactions is only 4KB, although the block may be bigger.
Most miners seem to implement this policy. So it's already happening that many free transactions are not managing to enter any block.

This is being discussed on other topics right now.

By the way, an important question: if I generate a 500KB block with only free transactions in it, it will be accepted by the network, right?
Or this current "default fee policy" is not just for the default client, but for the protocol as a whole?

Gavin, IMHO, transaction fee policy is a business to miners. You shouldn't care, unless you're developing a miner.

I think that the miner that comes with the default client should just be discontinued and removed from future versions. This way, there's no "default policy" and miners will create their own. If they want to accept free transactions they will, otherwise they won't, and they'll find their ways of prioritizing them.

The only thing that the client should be capable of doing is resending a transaction, with a higher fee.

It would also be nice too if the user could specify the transaction fee per transaction. The GUI could also allow different kind of inputs (absolute value, relative to the transaction size, relative to the amount etc)

Besides, the faucet gives you free money... you can't complain about the delay.

But this is interesting anyway. A few free transactions are starting to have a hard time getting included in the block chain... if this fee policy keeps being used by most miners, maybe it won't take much longer for it to become difficult to send any free transaction. People in a hurry will have to start adding fees.

Okay, the default client transaction policy. So, most custom miners are just following it... I thought people would create their own policies...

Anyway, so there's nothing digimag can do but wait.

The maximum block size is 10KB isn't it? So this isn't a problem of priority. There's enough space to include all of them. Plus, I've just checked a few of the last blocks, and them all contained free transactions, what means that miners are not deliberately refusing free transactions either.

There must be something particular to these transactions that don't get added...

Really? It's the first one I see.
Do you know if there's a way to dump the transaction pool, so people could see if there's anything particular with his transaction?

This is weird, I fail to understand what is the issue.

Does anyone else know if there's a way to dump the transaction pool?

The only thing that makes sense to me is that the transactions which have your address as output are not standard, but if it's the case, then it's probably a bug in the software, since I believe the faucet uses bitcoind to send its transactions.

It would be nice if somebody with a better knowledge of the source could take a look at this. Bump this thread tomorrow if you don't get any answer. The forums have been so busy lately, people might not notice your thread.

Won't help, it seems the transaction hasn't yet been added to the block chain.

According to the block explorer your address has never been used.

It's weird, if you see the 0/unconfirmed transaction it means the transaction was signed by the faucet and you received it on your client... why hasn't it been added to any block, I don't know... I mean, it seems the network forgot about it. I thought that in such situations your client (or that of the faucet) would rebroadcast it.

Unless there's something quite unusual with your transaction that is making every miner to refuse it. But why would the faucet produce a non-standard transaction and how come your client recognized it?

Yes. If you suspect your wallet has been compromised, you should:

• Generate 100 new addresses, and discard them (never use)
• Transfer any remaining coins on that wallet to a address generated after the 100 above.
• Never use any of the older addresses for any transaction.
• Most important, try to understand what happened in order not to keep your new addresses in the same compromised machine. Maybe a format if it was a virus, a divorce if it was your wife etc.

I agree, the thing is that it's just not that simple. If you keep your wallet on the same machine you use to surf the web, there's always risk. If besides that you use windows, the risk is greater. It's impossible to fully protect a user's computer if the user executes malicious code or if s/he trusts in people s/he shouldn't. And sometimes you may get a worm just for viewing the wrong web site, without executing anything else but normal browsing...

I think that the best solution for those who don't feel comfortable in keeping their own coins is:

• Have an offline wallet for your savings, as suggested before.
• Use a "bank" (MyBitcoin, MtGox, Bitcoin-central...) to keep the bitcoins you want to move more frequently.

Yes, they can be stolen.

If you want to protect your bitcoins yourself (instead of trusting on a web service), best thing you do is to keep your "savings" on a wallet that's on offline media. Encrypt it (check TrueCrypt if you don't know how) and make multiple copies (on different media, of course). Save at least one copy on a remote server like Dropbox, Gmail etc.