Should the bitcoin community ban the Satoshi Dice filter patch?

[Technomage]

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.

+100

[Technomage]

That is 3/4 of what SD does.

1/4 of what SD does is send worthless 0.00000001 bitcoins -- essentially instant messages / emails -- through the blockchain, saying "You lose"

That latter is informational, bloats our "unspent transaction" ledger with unspendable bitcoins, and should not be in the blockchain at all.

This is a very important point. Banning SD in general makes no sense whatsoever, but figuring out a mechanism to stop the 1 satoshi dust spam, is definitely needed.

[justusranvier]

This is a very important point. Banning SD in general makes no sense whatsoever, but figuring out a mechanism to stop the 1 satoshi dust spam, is definitely needed.

1 satoshi won't be dust forever.