This is great fun. We are like the government of Bitcoin, passing down regulations when we do not like the way someone uses our system.
Regulations? You trippin', chap? You should stop with that Silk Road acid, it's damaging your last neuron. LOL. Just brilliant. |
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I still believe their a good chance that within a few years i will have an opportunity to buy cheap bitcoins ( below 20$ ) and if it goes up to 100's of dollars, that's cool too  $20 is cheap already? Not many weeks ago that was eye-wateringly expensive! |
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I have never played Satoshi Dice, and view their transactions as spam, but I also view them as doing an VALUABLE SERVICE for Bitcoin and don't think it should be disrupted. I would be happy that a patch exists, but would also leave it disabled myself.
Without Satoshi Dice, we are left to guesstimate what will happen when we start reaching limits.
With Satoshi Dice, we reach those limits in a non-committal way. We get to find out how Bitcoin reacts under load, using a load that is for all intents and purposes optional.
If at some point Bitcoin becomes disrupted by transaction load (something I pretty much expect will happen eventually), we always have the option of throwing out the Satoshi Dice noise long enough to re-engineer Bitcoin to handle more activity. This is far better than reaching those limits with brick-and-mortar business activity that will turn off the business community if they end up being the guinea pigs for Bitcoin's scalability.
Because of Satoshi Dice, people are considering how to prune the blockchain and how to make a client function with a UTXO set rather than mandating everyone be a historian - something I'm afraid would be nowhere as progressed were it not for this game.
+1000 casascius. I think this description should on the newbie FAQ so that at least the discussion starts from a useful level, instead of the basement each time. |
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... Of course the other part is to implement technical measures to make the creation of economically unviable transactions expensive.
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... |
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Honestly, I'm sick of people ignoring all the optimizations that have already been identified and are just waiting to be coded, as if we're going to scale to 2000 tps without anyone bothering to implement any of them.
+1 What an apt post to mark Gavin's 2000th |
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This is there to create demand/limit supply, and to allow miners to collect fees for securing transactions in the network.
Where did Satoshi mention coding the 1MB limit so that miners can collect more fees? does it matter? My point is that a sensible version of Bitcoin will have a limit on how much data is put into the blockchain, i.e. that scarce resources (disk space and network bandwidth) are allocated in an optimal way. The optimal way will be determined by what transactions miners voluntarily include and which blocks the market considers valid bitcoin transactions. Think about this scenario. A hard fork is created with a self-adjusting block size limit. All users have a balance of original, authentic 1Mb-limit bitcoins, and also, a balance of 1+XMb limit, bigblockchaincoins (BBCcoins). Exchanges will be created that allow people to exchange these two types of coins between forks. As the two forks compete, the BBCcoins will see their blockchain keep getting larger at an exponential rate, while the bitcoin blockchain is pinned to linear growth at 1MB/10mins. People will start realizing that the vast size of the BBCblockchain is leading to lots of centralization (only few nodes verifying everything, only large mining ops able to compete). Now they are wondering whether the original bitcoin blockchain is preferable to mine/verify due to its smaller data size, and the presence of less spam, and higher fees/MB mined. Inevitably, the original bitcoin miners are less centralized, due to the smaller, spam-free blockchain. The added security makes bitcoins more valuable than the BBCcoins, and people start selling their BBCcoins. The lower fees/Mb in mining BBCcoins also makes people want to mine bitcoins for the higher fees, and over time, BBCcoins become worth a lot less, having a 4TB blockchain, while bitcoins are worth a lot more, having a 500GB blockchain. The smart investors win, the free market wins, BBCcoin holders lose, SD bots lose. I'm sensing some serious deja vu reading this. It sounds like another 14 point plan... Let's be generous and assume an average 90% probability that each step in the predicted chain of events occurs as described...
Event Probability
1 100%
2 90%
3 81%
4 73%
5 66%
6 59%
7 53%
8 48%
9 43%
10 39%
11 35%
12 31%
13 28%
14 25%
End result:
25% Smooth transition. All: "Hail misterbigg"
75% Train wreck, emergency block size increase. misterbigg: "Sorry, my next prediction will be better!"
<misterbigg >totaleclipseofthebank |
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Why would it cost 0.0000047? Who says the cost has to be that high? Do you have any real numbers showing how much it actually costs to do a transaction?
And why not have 10 million people doing that? Don't you want bitcoin to grow? The idea that we should limit its growth seems absurd to me.
You always want to limit the growth of an uneconomic activity. Even a loss leading item has to be economic when considered part of total inventory. 1 satoshi is ridiculously small. It is 0.5 millionths of a US$. If you had a music service where 10 million people bought single-tracks for 1 satoshi a time then you would earn $5 per day. This is 10 million transactions processed for $5 (ignoring costs and scope for profit). In four years Bitcoin has just processed 14 million transactions: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-totalCould it have done that for $7 ?? Consider all the disk space across thousands of nodes, the hashing power used, electricity, IT work, bandwidth! Then your music "service" wants Bitcoin to process 10 million more transactions, every single day, for $5, customers are always good to have, right? Draw your own conclusions about what micro-transactions are realistic. |
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etotheipi, Just want to say: "Thanks very much. I use Armory and it is great."
edit: donation pinged your way now...
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Who knows, maybe provably fair gambling is the "killer app" for Bitcoin.
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... |
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Excellent ideas!
Is it feasible to get such an improvement into an official version during 2013?
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Do you want to be like proudhon, envious of all the people who bought at $2 as he proclaimed the death of bitcoin? He's kicking himself now.
I feel sorry for proudhon if he has sold his holding competely, he comes across as a nice person... |
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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?
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. |
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As ET said, no miner has the initiative NOT to accept a fee of 1 satoshi for tx.
Miners are not as dumb as a herd of goats. If it costs the network 47 satoshis for 1 miner to accept a 1 satoshi fee - then they will stop accepting such low fees. At the moment the high block reward disguises such calculations. |
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Think about music. I would never pay as much as one cent per play of a song, but I might be willing to pay 0.0000001btc/song. The ability to have really truly small transactions is one of the benefits that makes bitcoin worth using over the traditional payment systems.
That's the problem, your example becomes a fallacy if it costs the Bitcoin network 0.0000047 to process your 0.0000001 payment. This might be fine if it was just you, but not 10 million people doing the same thing! |
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If the Bitcoin fx rate goes above $100 and stays there, the argument for thousandths becomes much stronger. What about "Bitmil"? as mil was standard for the few currencies, like the pound in Cyprus, which had a minor unit of 1/1000..  |
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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. ...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
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. |
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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.
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Unfortunately, the patch is not much more effective than turning the radio up to drown out a strange noise from the car.
I wouldn't be so sure. Having Bitcoin users get into the habit of understanding and applying client changes is a good way to raise awareness. Ultimately, it is only through informed decisions about what changes to accept or reject that we can have a healthy network of decentralized nodes. Yes, in the general sense you are absolutely right. It is this specific case which has me worried. As you say "not good". Even if SD starts behaving, several similar applications could kick off at any time... |
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