The blockchain would not get that big since these transactions would never be included in a block. For block inclusion, miners have a strong interest in setting their own anti-spam rules, bitcoind only needs to make it configurable.

The problem is relaying. If your transaction doesn't follow the hard-coded anti-DoS fees it might never reach a miner which would be willing to include it.

Maybe the priority calculation should only come into place if you're receiving more transactions than you can relay without breaking the max KB/s value, or if your memory pool is full (configurable max size for pool).
But the priority calculation should not be "binary" (has enough fees, doesn't have enough fees), but rather a way of knowing which transactions to discard first (normally the attacker's transactions would be the firsts discarded, unless he's willing to spend money on his attack, in which case it'd be more of a donation to miners than an actual attack).

Do you see my point? I realize it would shift from "hardcoded minimum fee" to "hardcoded max bandwidth/memory consumption", but at least the latter seems more coherent with anti-DoS purposes. It would also need to be updated once in a while to reflect increases in available resources, but that happens less often than bitcoin's price movements IMHO.

+1


Wouldn't it be even better to stop using fees as anti-DoS?
Why can't we detect DoS by simply measuring the amount of data a peer is sending? If it goes beyond X KB/s, we stop storing and relaying transactions coming from this peer, eventually we disconnect from it and temporarily ban its IP locally. X could be configurable, in case there's a strong need to change the defaults without a release.

Would that be too difficult to implement?

I never liked this "fees as anti-DoS" thing....

If your computer was not shared with anyone, encrypting your wallet would not have saved your coins. If an attacker manages to install something at your computer, this something can simply wait until you type the password in and then your coins are gone.
Encrypting your wallet only protects against physical theft of the media containing the wallet.

Not using Windows is certainly a much strong security approach than encrypting your wallet. You should consider it. Even better: your bitcons should be in a system which never access the Internet. Of course that's not super convenient as of now, so what I normally suggest is keeping two wallets: one offline, and another, with a smaller amount you could afford to lose, in a machine (preferably not Windows) that's used for Internet access.

AFAIK, WU moves fiat around the globe, and handles currency conversion. You give them USD, and they deposit INR in some Indian account you specified, for ex.
They could potentially decrease their costs by using Bitcoin as intermediary currency. That would work particularly well if they were acting as exchanges too. They could do it incrementally, for example, at a first moment, only use BTC as intermediary for (some) USD<->EUR transactions, since the liquidity of these markets (BTC/USD and BTC/EUR) is better than any other.

Thanks dooglus. Mine was off.

I don't think so, otherwise every RPC-command should contain the encryption password as a parameter. I believe you unlock the wallet while starting the service. Or the RPC-authentication password is also the wallet encryption password (don't think so either because RPC is much older than wallet encryption).

You may check https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/API_reference_(JSON-RPC) for better info.

EDIT: Just checked and there are explicit RPC calls to lock and unlock the wallet. The wallet was then likely not encrypted, or encrypted with a weak password.

That was irrelevant. The RPC was open, and the authentication password was weak.
EDIT: To be honest I actually don't know if, when starting bitcoind as a RPC server, you have to open your encrypted wallet by typing the password. I'm assuming that's the case, what renders wallet encryption irrelevant.

Does the same apply to Chromium?

But the formula remains arbitrary. You can't come up with an algorithm capable of measuring actual demand and actual supply, since these units are impossible to measure. So you can't really know how many security is demanded (remember, demand is subjective!), nor how such demand would compete for Earth's scarce resources. You need to be omniscient to know all that.
 

The difficulty target aims to make one block at every 10min. But why 10min? This is an arbitrary value. It may be too much sometimes, too little at other times. It's certainly not optimal. That said, it's not such a big deal, and trying to improve it would not be worth the risks.

Concerning mining remuneration, if we can go directly to spontaneous order - and that's the closest you'll ever get from "optimal" -, then why not? Why try to come up with arbitrary formulas? That would be "presumption of knowledge".


SD is not flooding anything. They're not attacking the network, Bitcoin users want to use their services.
Of all business, they're likely the one that has mostly contributed to miners via transaction fees.


Miners have no interest in keeping a "monster block". And they can easily choose not to build on top of such block, unless it is N blocks deep already, what would likely get the monster block rejected by the network.

I believe their motive is to try to convince those who want to cripple Bitcoin to a 1Mb block size limit that such crippling is not a good idea...


I used to support such idea, until I realize that a dynamic cap implies in an arbitrary formula, and that's an attempt to guess subjective demands and unpredictable supplies. It's impossible, and fortunately, not necessary.

O mercado bitcoin fazia cold storage?

Vi muitas mensagens aí de gente estocando altas granas na eWallet do Mercado Bitcoin... pô galera, vocês não acompanham o que acontece não? eWallets são hackeadas direto... e, até onde eu sei, o Mercado era um one-man-show. Um cara sozinho contra todos os hackers do planeta (sim, todos os malditos hackers do planeta sabem oq é Bitcoin, e vão tentar roubar o primeiro site que der um deslize)... por mais competente que ele seja, é arriscado.

Espero que a porcentagem de Bitcoins em cold storage seja alta.

On the terminology: https://mises.org/daily/908

Inflation is not elegant at all. It's the worst way to charge people. It's disguised, distributes its load on people who are not creating the load, etc. Even in the context of a voluntary currency, it's almost dishonest. In the context of legal tender, it being theft is not a "fundamentalist stance", it's a fact.


Sure it does. That's the very definition of monetary inflation.


You're confusing monetary inflation with price increases.

I know, read my first post in this thread.

But countries M0s are not the same as their M1. It would be more reasonable to compare with their M0, since the day Bitcoin start to have fiduciary money, it will have aggregates that are larger than this so-called "market cap". And btw, if you compare with M0, we've already passed much more countries, since M0 <= M1.

I did not find a ranking of countries per M0 TDV though....

That's what I taught when I saw it.

They claim you can buy at any site in the world. Really? So I can have something shipped from Iran here to me in France, for instance? Will they handle any currency conversion, get through all financial embargos etc?

The idea is cool, but what it claims to do seems impossible.

It seems you made some mistakes with your quotes there...

Answering your question: If mixers end up segregated among "blacklisted" and "non-blacklisted", somebody receiving coins coming out of "mostly blacklisted mixers" would be able to:

• Know the coins have a high degree of blacklisted taint
• Know the coins likely got through some mixer (that's visible)

These two things might lead people to believe that those coins might be hiding something. That alone is not enough to prosecute anybody (at least not in places where the most basic justice principles are still respected, like innocent until proven guilty), but it might give some tips.

My point is that this thread is comparing Bitcoin's M0 TDV with these countries M1 TDV. Comparing against countries M0 would be more coherent (and would make the list much larger ). But I did not find a ranking of countries per M0....

If the majority of coins being mixed are tainted, you would still get tainted coins out. True, that should make it difficult to discover which particular taint applies to you, but tainting only should never be enough to criminalize anybody anyway. The whole idea, if I got it right, was to help law enforcement to find criminals.
What I'm saying is that the coins getting out of this "blacklisted mixers" would still sound some alarms...

Cool thread!

But why M1? Why not M0, since in Bitcoin there's no fractional reserve banking (Bitcoin M0 == M1). I think it's more reasonable... The "market cap" is the Bitcoin's monetary base times its unit price.
EDIT: The point I'm trying to make is that, currently, for Bitcoin, M0==M1==M2==M3, i.e., Bitcoin has no monetary aggregates since it has no fiduciary money. But if one day Bitcoin start having some fiduciary money, the so called "market cap" (number of issued coins X price) would represent Bitcoin's M0, not its M1. So I'd say it's more reasonable to compare it with countries' M0 (also called monetary base).

Bitcoin's M0 is already larger than that of Iceland and certainly many others.

This assurance contract theory is interesting, but I don't view merchants themselves doing the pledges.
Perhaps insurance+assurance would work better. The merchant only wants to be sure he won't be defrauded. He pays an insurance contract for his transactions. Insurers want to make sure the network has enough hash rate to make it unlikely that many of their insured transactions get double-spent, so they may start these pledges. Other insurers may contribute.

I don't think merchants themselves would start the pledges because that would involve complex calculations (how much is enough?) whose results would change frequently. Merchants wouldn't want to be bothered with such things.