Lemme try to guess a few:

If you send them a whole bunch of really tiny outputs you can make their wallet really slow.

You could trick new users into solving captchas for very tiny payments because they don't realize that they won't be able to actually spend them.

If you send names you know lots of small payments you can hope that they get pulled into other transactions they make, cross linking their addresses, and deanonymizing them.

As far .. you know, actually paying someone? I haven't a clue.  Sufficiently small transactions, for some definition of sufficient, have 0 value if anything they have negative value, they aren't a payment.

I recommend using this compressed key:

Address: 1diceineSzVPNQnCZB7mZz2Sjp5UpjnPR
Privkey: L1fSLx5RBKakdM8LqHXNMwbDAQTc8zevJxgG23uPryogxUmCyYbQ

(I've modified vanitygen to generate compressed keys, but only the cpu code as I no longer have any GPUs… it's even faster than uncompressed key searching. But I can't really justify putting in the time to do gpu support or test it out well enough to publish it. )

I wonder how many other kilopost accounts here are him?

First, Bitcoin is a decentralized currency. It is not a data storage service. Bitcoin would be a very bad design for a storage service, and it's only attractive to some for this purpose due to the non-consensual aspects of it.

As far as fees go— there is no automatic moral righteousness that comes from paying fees: If I pay a big enough fee to your neighbor should I be able to show up and drill holes in your head?  Why not?? I paid a fee!!!!

The costs of data storage are not just borne by the single miner that accepts the transaction and has arguably been paid for their trouble they are imposed on the entire network— all current and future users of Bitcoin— for all time. Of course, miners who don't agree with the policy are free to adopt other fee policies— there is even a config file setting for it but I expect that few to none will— because they care about Bitcoin as a currency and want the bitcoins they mine to be valuable.

You can expect that the core development team will continue to defend Bitcoin against non-currency usage at least to the extent they believe and there is evidence that the non-currency usage is non-trivially harmful to the usage of Bitcoin as a decentralized currency.  If you don't like it, you should probably find other software to run. (And probably another network: I doubt you'll find many Bitcoin users who are friendly to chewing up their bandwidth, diskspace, and processor cycles to store data that you're not paying them to store)

Finally, even with this change people can still create stupid data bloating transactions— but they need to put as much bitcoin value in their unspendable outputs as a plausibly real transaction does. This is a 5000x disincentive and the result is effectively paying all the current and future users of Bitcoin through increase scarcity.

No, nodes relaying non-standard transactions are not disconnected. That would make it infeasible to have inconsistencies in policy. Part of the point of policy vs protocol rules is that policy isn't required to be completely consistent for correct operation.


Biased how? As I posted in these threads— Bitcoin is _full_ of restrictions, its value is— in fact— derived almost entirely from restrictions.   Discouraging the creation of transaction outputs that yield fewer Bitcoins than they cost to spend is pretty "value neutral". It's a little insane that they can be created at all. As far as I'm aware a policy to restrict them doesn't discriminate against any kind of usage other than the "usage" of forcing hundreds of thousands of machines to archive non-bitcoin data against their operators consent. As far as I know it won't interfere with any publicly (or privately, for that matter) known service. So whats this bias that you speak of?   Please— point me to a currency use of Bitcoin that this will break, because if there is one then we need to figure that out! If it's something private, reach out to me via gpg encrypted anonymous email.

It should not have any impact on these parties. It's sad that people are getting worked up here over confusion and misguided guesswork.

Right. "Protocol" in our normal dialong is stuff you MUST do or you're incompatible, will end up on chain forks, etc.  Policy is just decision you make on your own which don't need to be consistent.   Mining and relay rules are a little on the line, and thats probably causing some confusion here— they are not protocol, they are policy— but they are policy that has impact on third parties, not just yourself.

With the exception of genjix's motivations for posting the code— which I don't recall hearing comments on before— I believe the factual statements provided in GenJix's posts are consistent with the claims I've heard and impressions I've received all along from the involved parties that I'd talked to.  Basically not a word of hist post is news to me (except the code posting stuff as mentioned). As someone who wasn't involved I can't personally vouch for the truth of any of it but I do believe this has been the Bitcoin consultancy folks position all along.  And I have not seen evidence which contradicts their positions, and as things unraveled new evidence (e.g. about the identity of the mtgox theift) appeared to their prior positions.

I think the notion of 'sides' is a little misleading. Many things have no "sides", Many things have enormous numbers of "sides".  There being exactly two sides mostly has the benefit of achieving the greatest drama and polarization.

I think what I get from this comic is mostly a statement about the relative volume in self selecting forum not really having that much to do with representativeness. It's the loudmouths that drive the discussions, but they don't necessarily represent particular interests well.  And, of course, it applies to all participants. (I know that I'm sometimes guilty of being outspoken relative to groups I could be considered a part of, sometimes to negative effect).

Today I learned!

This thread is kinda weird— it seems to suggest that there is a OR here, but I don't see how any answer can be anything other than yes, both. Bitcoin is just another thing you can own, like coal or beanie babies— and it would be very unusual for it to be highly regulated itself at least according to the norms of the more free nations. ... but it interacts with the banking world, which is highly regulated.  Some people will see it in their interest to try to work with regulators to achieve good outcomes for themselves (and everyone else), other people will go off in a multitude of directions which are not regulatory centric (and which, as a result, don't interact much with traditional banking).  Both things will happen no matter what folks want overall.  This doesn't bother me: The fact that Bitcoin is diverse is part of what makes it strong.  Not only would "regulating bitcoin" (itself) be inconsistent with the expected freedoms in first world nations, it's not obviously viable so long as bitcoin is thoroughly decentralized.

The OP also brought up another question though... how do we fund useful developments which are highly decenteralized— and thus can't easily fund themselves— when they don't really mesh well with the banking/regulation universe that many of the big name business players that we'd hope to bankroll development?

I don't really have an answer— I think ultimately our inability to answer it might be our downfall. Eventually the people currently working on Bitcoin technology for the love and principle of it will wear out. Will we only be left with serious work being done by people deeply in bed with large regulatory-target businesses?

Correct. It's already the case that zero fee transactions can't have any outputs less than 0.01 BTC. The transactions intended to force-bitcoin-users-to-store-arbitrary-data typically have one large output (their change) and pay a single 0.0005 fee and then have many 1e-8 outputs each packing another 160 bits of storage data which can never be pruned.  The data storage transactions are distinguished from normal transactions in that their outputs are actually unspendable (though this can't be detected) so all funds send to them are lost forever (effectively donations to all Bitcoin users in the form of increase scarcity). Just increasing the fees on transactions would harm regular transaction users and the data-stuffers alike— while penalizing tiny output sizes has a special cost for data stuffing, since that value can't benefit the stuffer.

Miners accept transactions with no fees at all for the same reasons they always have: They aren't irrational, if they engaged in maximize-income-at-all-costs behavior and denyed all free transactions or processed anything with fees regardless of the impact on Bitcoin then the coins they're mining wouldn't be worth as much. The long term health and usability of Bitcoin is in their interests.

I think it's fantastic that you care deeply about Bitcoin, but I also think you're confused about whats going on— and as a result you're attacking other people who care deeply about Bitcoin and do a lot to protect it as well as attacking a beneficial change which will protect Bitcoin to the extent that it does anything at all.

I'm trying to decode what you're saying and I didn't respond that way with the intention of insulting you. I think if we were able to achieve productive communication you'd agree with me and wouldn't worry about this.

Can you walk me through who these people are, what they are doing, and how Bitcoin will be ruined for them?

HUH?  Let me try to break this down:

> If a big mining pool

OKAY, I follow.

> changes to that

0.8.2 with this change, I assume, okay

> and starts getting a lot of blocks

Okay, well finding blocks is just a product of hash power and luck

> then obvious there

Where?!

> choosing to use that method of blocking dust

HUH?! Running this code has nothing to do with finding blocks.  I understand the words you are using but the way you are stringing them together is virtuoso rutabaga.

^ right there.

Has nothing to do with a majority of hashing power. If, for example, 10% of hashing power were under the old rules (or some alternative anti-spam rules that still allowed very small outputs under some conditions) then you'd expect 1:10 blocks to include transactions paying the small amounts.

GAH. Will you f@#$@# stop with the constant stream of misinformation?!

No "majority of miners hashing power" comes into this at all: It's not enforced against blocks.

Miners running with the defaults won't mine transactions with outputs of 54µBTC but will happily accept blocks that do and nodes running with defaults won't relay them.  Anyone can change their own defaults and presumably would if the value of Bitcoin changed dramatically.  Likewise new versions could have different defaults.  There is no dividing bitcoin issue at all, this is just node implementation behavior not a blockchain-protocol rule, and everything remains totally compatible.

... Bitcoin _is_ limits, without limits it would be worthless.

Satoshis are currently useless because Bitcoin doesn't (yet) have infinite value. The fact that they can't be further divided within the Bitcoin system isn't really relevant.

No matter how much you make the precision there will inevitably be some value which is basically useless unless you make the precision too low and it starts getting in the way of transaction.

There are technical ways this all could be improved— make the creator of an output pay the full fee for redeeming it, so no transaction can cost more to redeem than its worth... but they're not related to precision and may be too drastic to ever adopt anything like them in Bitcoin.

I wish. 0-value outputs can't be pruned because they can still be spent. I _think_ I'd like us to some day make 0-value txouts impossible to spend (e.g. via a softfork), and then they could be pruned... but it's not clear if perhaps there wouldn't be good uses for them, and there is no rush now because since they're non-standard their use isn't large or increasing.  Getting rid of them has "theoretical attractiveness" because so long as there are no zero value outputs the maximum size of the utxo set is bounded and known. (And before someone gets spun up, I don't think the same about low but not zero value txouts, for all the obvious reasons)

It was easier to make 0 value txouts non-standard because there was no uncertainty about future Bitcoin values or such— it's obvious that a zero value output can't yield more Bitcoin than it costs to spend, since it yields none at all. Without the uncertainty you don't need to wonder about how you'll adjust things over time or what the right initial threshold is, etc.

The exact same thing that already happens, in fact— an output of less than 0.01 implies a minimum fee of 0.0005 and 1.42055000-1.42052000=0.00003 which is less than 0.0005 so instead of adding the 0.00003 output as change and then having to pay an additional 0.0005 in fees, it just directly pays the 0.00003 as fees. In that case the 5430 satoshi threshold doesn't come into it because the 0.01 threshold matters more.