Yes.  You should read that link you posted.  Again, an unspent transaction does impose an ongoing resource cost upon the greater, collective network, however small that cost may be.  It's right there.  The merkle hash tree is intended to permit the block to be pruned of spent transactions but unspent transactions cannot be pruned.  Hence the cost.  I'm beginning to get annoyed.  I started this thread to have an educated conversation with intelligent peers, and I find myself spending too much time pointing out the basic errors of understanding of others instead.

If the (only|most available) copy of an old block is the one that the spender has, this introduces an attack vector not present in Bitcoin now.  The obvious one that I can think of is that Bitcoin depends on the independently verifiable blocks that are provided by multiple sources not connected to the parties involved in the trade, or at least enough sources that it's extremely unlikely that all those peers are connected to either party in the trade.  If the only copy available to the miner of the input block is the one provided by the sender himself, a spoofed block is then possible.  How hard do you think it would be to fake a block and transaction set that could hash to match the merkle root of one block too old for miners to keep?  It might take a malicious node a few days to find the right combo of extra-nonce and false transactions to match the merkle root, but time is of little concern in such an attack.

Spending coins in this way is the only way to have a decent risk assessment while using two lightweight clients while offline, but this can never be the norm.


Your core premise is false.  Easily proven as such, and you even use some of that evidence to support your false premise.  I find that amazing.

Well, that does sound interesting, but I actually need a wallet that is not RFID proof.  I use an RFID security access card from within my wallet for moving about the secure areas of my employer.

I suppose that would work, if we were starting over or starting a new fork of code, but this problem doesn't justify a breaking change.

It is unsafe.  The consumer (you) need to be more dilligent about the quality of vendors you do business with, as opposed to being dependent upon the chargebacks that other payment methods provide for you while charging the vendor 1.9% of the cost of the item.

You're probably right about that, but I dont have the skillset required to modify the source.

I'm still waiting for any of the developers to chime in and tell me how demurrage could be done, or if it's even possible, beyond the early idea of an alternate minimum fee upon eventual transfer.  I still can't grasp how lost coins could even  be 'rotted'.

I think that it's totally reasonable for users to refresh once a year.

I'm trying to set up a bitcoin client to run entirely from a thumbdrive, using the latest MS client.  I find that it puts the wallet.dat, blk0001.dat, and blkindex.dat files in an entirely insecure location, namely on the C: drive in the appdata subdirectories.  I don't want that behavior at all, and need to know how I should go about getting the client installed onto the thumb drive to use the copies of these files I have on the thumbdrive itself and to not write data to the C: drive or the registry whatever.

 

I was really hoping that you had a better understanding of all this by now.

How do you propose to do this?  My understanding of the system doesn't allow for discounting of transactions (or accounts, if you prefer) without significant changes to the technical aspects.


This would likely introduce other perverse incentives than what I was trying to prevent, and I would have to oppose that on principle and on economic grounds.  Any demurrage system must scale relative to the real costs to the network scale, and that means per transaction and not per transaction value setting.


This is neither economicly sound, nor relevant to Bitcoin.  It's not remotely relevant to the problem I'm trying to avoid.


I don't even think that this is possible.


No.  Absolutely not.  I would much prefer to leave the potential problem unaddressed than proceed in this manner.

Shutup Dude!  You're going to give away the game!

This is not so.  The average Joe only cares that his paper currency can be taken to another store next week or next month and buy (almost) as much as he had to give to get it.  For the average Joe, the relative difficulty in counterfitting is only important in that same context.

I don't care if it scares of new people.  This is a forum, it is not Bitcoin itself.  I will not sensor civilly expressed personal opinions, personally.  That would violate my own principles.

This is assumed to be true, but the prisoner's dilemma was recently put to the test and the results were mixed.  Not all users will only do what is in their own best interests, even if they don't know the others and they are forever anonymous.  Game theory is just what it says, it's a theory.

It's provably true that there is a cost to maintaining old transactions, however small that it is.


If this were universally true, where would the miners download the old blocks from?  The miners is where those blocks are most likely to be kept.

I see this as an unintended consequence of the network providing for free storage indefinitely, and I don't agree that it would be a workable solution, or even generally a positive consequence.


Once again, there is a provable degree of storage costs suffered by the network.  If you don't believe that is true, then just consider what you think would happen if transactions stopped.


Old transactions are indeed 'using' Bitcoin.  The only way to not be using bitcoin is to sell out all that you have so that someone else is using what you once had.  If you have a positive balance in bitcoin, you're using the system by defintion.

This is how we can keep it from "going that low"

It necessarily needs it, in some form or fashion.  And the max block size is going to go away.  Too many people are opposed to the artificial scarcity that it imposes, and want to remove it and let it become a true free market.

An adaptive max block size is fine for it's own reasons, if a system can be agreed upon, and that really would have to be code enforced.  But that would not solve the problem.  There is little evidence that such compensation will be appropriate to overcome the 'free storage' problem, and much economic theory that suggests that over the long term free storage of old transactions will distort the market.

I don't know how to deal with lost coins, or even if it's possible.
Yes, it does.  That's my point.  It may not require much, but it does require some resources.
That's why I started this thread, to have that conversation.

Miners don't have as much control as you think.  There is a market that they have to respond to, so there needs to be published expectations.  This is not an unpredictable issue, it's a very definable economic issue.

No, because demurrage would have to scale depending upon the number of existing transactions.  It's the avoidance of demurrage, with the inclusion of a 'grace' period, that encourages major savers to consolidate their holdings.

How much would you charge?

That's fine, but it would still be ideal if everyone knew in advance what those rulesets are likely to include.  This means that it would be wise to include storage fees/demurrage sooner rather than later.  It needs to be part of the status quo before the economy grows so large as to solidify that status quo, which in practice means that it needs to be included into the standard clients and miners as a default condition.  Miners could then choose to opt out of charging that fee at their own will, just like they can opt out of limiting the size of the free transaction section of the block now.