Soft block size limit reached, action required by YOU

[OneMINER]

Last few posts (excluding the one right before this one) show an epic misunderstanding of what's going on. Bitcoin isn't broken, SD didn't break it. It's a sort of thorn in our sides. On the other hand, how can anybody be glad that the blockchain "is being flooded"? We live in a finite universe, you can't fit an infinite amount of anything in anything. The blockchain is no exception. The amount of fees that SD pays is besides the point. The question at hand is, of what value is all the data that's in the blockchain? We have to carry this with us, it makes sense to only take the essentials. If most of the data is noise then it impacts the useability of bitcoin. So for this reason I say that in the case of the blockchain there is such a thing as garbage, undesirable contents.

Look at my last post. I detail some facts about mining and miners. Miners DO have the power (and authority) to censor transactions. They can DEMAND that you pay a higher fee. This isn't a mistake, these are the brakes designed into the system for EXACTLY THIS PURPOSE. I contend that no system exists that can withstand an infinite amount of bad product, waste or whatever you'd like to call it. Further I expressly retain the right to kick this noise to the curb if I feel it will benefit the network.

Good day sirs!

[1713962129]

1713962129

[1713962129]

1713962129

[1713962129]

1713962129

[1713962129]

1713962129

[1713962129]

1713962129

[johnyj]

I had a feeling that many people's mindset are still stayed in the fiat currency world, which is a world with unlimited money supply and endless chasing of exponential growth

Why can't they think like Austrian economists?  It seems that FED's brainwash is quite effective  

Like the limitation in total amount of coins, let's make a schedule to increase the soft block size limit every 4 year by 256k, 128k, 64k, 32k etc... and see what that brings  

IMO this will make bitcoin concept more consistent: Limited supply and limited transaction capacity

[Daily Anarchist]

Last few posts (excluding the one right before this one) show an epic misunderstanding of what's going on. Bitcoin isn't broken, SD didn't break it. It's a sort of thorn in our sides. On the other hand, how can anybody be glad that the blockchain "is being flooded"? We live in a finite universe, you can't fit an infinite amount of anything in anything. The blockchain is no exception. The amount of fees that SD pays is besides the point. The question at hand is, of what value is all the data that's in the blockchain? We have to carry this with us, it makes sense to only take the essentials. If most of the data is noise then it impacts the useability of bitcoin. So for this reason I say that in the case of the blockchain there is such a thing as garbage, undesirable contents.

Look at my last post. I detail some facts about mining and miners. Miners DO have the power (and authority) to censor transactions. They can DEMAND that you pay a higher fee. This isn't a mistake, these are the brakes designed into the system for EXACTLY THIS PURPOSE. I contend that no system exists that can withstand an infinite amount of bad product, waste or whatever you'd like to call it. Further I expressly retain the right to kick this noise to the curb if I feel it will benefit the network.

Good day sirs!

I think the fact that Satoshi Dice is a gambling service is what's clouding your judgment.

Imagine if NOBODY knew what all of these transactions were being used for. Then what would people say? Would they still be complaining about too many transactions? At the end of the day that's what this is all about. How many transactions and how much space do we want to store on our hard drives?

Disk space is CHEAP, and getting CHEAPER, and there are ways to innovate storing and downloading the blockchain. The idea that bitcoin should be hardcapped at 7 transactions per second is so ludicrous I really can't believe people are defending it at all.

[SgtSpike]

Last few posts (excluding the one right before this one) show an epic misunderstanding of what's going on. Bitcoin isn't broken, SD didn't break it. It's a sort of thorn in our sides. On the other hand, how can anybody be glad that the blockchain "is being flooded"? We live in a finite universe, you can't fit an infinite amount of anything in anything. The blockchain is no exception. The amount of fees that SD pays is besides the point. The question at hand is, of what value is all the data that's in the blockchain? We have to carry this with us, it makes sense to only take the essentials. If most of the data is noise then it impacts the useability of bitcoin. So for this reason I say that in the case of the blockchain there is such a thing as garbage, undesirable contents.

Look at my last post. I detail some facts about mining and miners. Miners DO have the power (and authority) to censor transactions. They can DEMAND that you pay a higher fee. This isn't a mistake, these are the brakes designed into the system for EXACTLY THIS PURPOSE. I contend that no system exists that can withstand an infinite amount of bad product, waste or whatever you'd like to call it. Further I expressly retain the right to kick this noise to the curb if I feel it will benefit the network.

Good day sirs!

You're kind of getting to the same point, just from a different direction.

The fact is, miners can choose to to do whatever the heck they want.  Which is exactly what you said, and exactly why I am glad that Satoshi Dice has been doing what it has been doing, because it will begin forcing miners to care about what transactions they include and what transactions they do not include, and whether they want to increase the soft limit or hard limit on block sizes, etc.  It will force users of Bitcoin to decide whether they want to include fees and how large of a fee to include, and it'll force clients to give users more flexibility in whether they choose to include a fee or not and how large that fee should be.  And while we can sit in this thread all day discussing the best course of action, it is ultimately entirely in the power of each individual to decide what is best for them to do.

In other words, SD is forcing us to face the growing pains of Bitcoin.  The GROWING pains.

I like it.  It'll mean a more mature and usable Bitcoin down the road.

[Prattler]

I think the fact that Satoshi Dice is a gambling service is what's clouding your judgment.

Imagine if NOBODY knew what all of these transactions were being used for. Then what would people say? Would they still be complaining about too many transactions? At the end of the day that's what this is all about. How many transactions and how much space do we want to store on our hard drives?

Disk space is CHEAP, and getting CHEAPER, and there are ways to innovate storing and downloading the blockchain. The idea that bitcoin should be hardcapped at 7 transactions per second is so ludicrous I really can't believe people are defending it at all.

It's not about gambling, it's about how expensive their implementation is. They outsourced the cost and they're not paying (enough) themselves.

Reread this:

For an easy analogy, this would be like WalMart charging your credit card for every item you pick up off the shelf, and refunding you if you put it back (actually worse, since SD uses 2 transactions for every action).
Not even VISA/MC could handle that kind of abuse, and their system (being centralised) is far more efficient than Bitcoin.

[SgtSpike]

It's not about gambling, it's about how expensive their implementation is. They outsourced the cost and they're not paying (enough) themselves.

They are paying exactly what miners require.  If you want them to pay more, then miners have to require more.

[Prattler]

It's not about gambling, it's about how expensive their implementation is. They outsourced the cost and they're not paying (enough) themselves.

They are paying exactly what miners require.  If you want them to pay more, then miners have to require more.

The answer was already given.

The proposed transaction fee solution works in most cases, but not SatoshiDice because they have social-engineered gamblers into covering the fees for them, and to make it worse the gamblers are willing to pay a higher fee than real users. If Bitcoin had achieved critical mass already, we might have been able to just say "too bad, deal with higher fees", but at this pre-adoption stage the response to that would almost certainly be "screw you, I'll stick with VISA".

In other words: to ease adoption, bitcoin transactions need to be cheap for users who transfer value, but they need to be expensive for SD which is just abusing the system for information transfer. If we didn't care for bitcoin success, high fees would be the answer.

[eleuthria]

When a bet goes to SD, it normally has a fee (unless it's not required).  Same when the bet result comes back from SD.  Sure, that transaction fee cost is built into their profit model, so it "comes from the gambler".  Just like the fees that VISA charges the merchants filters its way into how they price their goods.

SatoshiDice pays its fair share of fees on both sides.  Stating otherwise is a lie.

[fireduck]

And don't forget: Satoshi Dice has probably paid more in transaction fees than the entire network combined throughout history (not counting mistakes and/or testing transactions).

Dice payouts include fees, as do most of the bets that go there in the first place.

2721 BTC to date (not including what players may or may not pay to get transactions to us).

[muyuu]

I can't wrap my head around why so many people are hating on Satoshi Dice.

What if there were some African business helping to educate or feed starving kids in Africa and it had a business model that produced a huge quantity of transactions, would you still be against it?

I really think these anti-Satoshi Dice people are elitists who think that because gambling is stupid in their minds that nobody should be able to.

As if the Bitcoin Protocol gives a shit about what the transactions are used for.

And Luke-Jr says SD is breaking the rules. Really? I was under the impression that any transactions that broke the rules were immediately rejected by the bitcoin protocol. I mean, it looks like they're playing by the rules to me.

Seriously, if Bitcoin can't handle Satoshi Dice just throw in the towel right now, because I have some news for you. In the future, when Bitcoin is the GLOBAL MONETARY STANDARD, 95% of all transactions are likely to be gambling, sex, and drug related.

Those seem to be things that people value highly in life. Just because your puritan asses can't handle it doesn't mean we can't.

I, for one, LOVE that Satoshi Dice is flooding the blockchain.

Frankly, if some charity spammed the blockchain in the same way, I'd have the same stance.

Since early on I believed that the system as a whole won't scale if some fee scheme isn't enforced. We're delaying this but I don't see any good reason why. There are many ways the blockchain can be attacked because of this policy and SD is just one. I can start a number of bots passing small amounts among a big number of addresses and have a ridiculous number of transactions that would do nothing but bloating the blockchain. Nothing at all prevents this other than the waste of bandwidth.

The whole system is designed so you don't need to trust anyone. Yet we just rely on the fact that people are not going to spam the blockchain to the point that the hard limit of 1MB per block isn't enough.

Nothing personal against SD, it simply shouldn't exist if it cannot deal with higher transaction fees. I just want a system that scales and doesn't need changing every other year to delay the fact that one day fees will have to be put in place, both to finance mining and to prevent reckless spamming of the blockchain.

If we're introducing a serious change we might as well deal with it in a more generic way now. Today is SD tomorrow it will be something else, malicious or not.

The fact that the "standard" client takes dogs years to sync with the blockchain already hinders adoption by the common folk substantially, and this is not helping.

Let's see what the miners "vote". I believe both blocking SD and increasing blocksize arbitrarily are short term solutions. We speculate that either of these will give us years. I don't think we should rely on that.

Leaving things alone is also an interesting option although one that will likely hurt Bitcoin's image. Eventually fees will set themselves (at the expense of some people losing coins). But this is exactly the same we're relying on to account for the block reward halving, when the moment comes that it doesn't justify mining on its own.

At this rate every transaction with a low enough fee will be a gamble itself.

TL;DR: enforce fees already. Agree a scheme for the minimum fee and put it in place. I believe the best would be a fee proportional to the size in KB of the transaction. Block size costs. Zillions of people are using real storage and bandwidth. If you think KB is too complicated for the common folk maybe make it 0.1% or something like that.

[Mike Hearn]

Thank you eleuthria, pending transactions are indeed dropping fast even though many pools haven't yet adjusted. Slush said he'd update his pool tomorrow, I think. Hopefully others will soon follow.

[SgtSpike]

It's not about gambling, it's about how expensive their implementation is. They outsourced the cost and they're not paying (enough) themselves.

They are paying exactly what miners require.  If you want them to pay more, then miners have to require more.

The answer was already given.

The proposed transaction fee solution works in most cases, but not SatoshiDice because they have social-engineered gamblers into covering the fees for them, and to make it worse the gamblers are willing to pay a higher fee than real users. If Bitcoin had achieved critical mass already, we might have been able to just say "too bad, deal with higher fees", but at this pre-adoption stage the response to that would almost certainly be "screw you, I'll stick with VISA".

In other words: to ease adoption, bitcoin transactions need to be cheap for users who transfer value, but they need to be expensive for SD which is just abusing the system for information transfer. If we didn't care for bitcoin success, high fees would be the answer.

Why do "normal" users deserve to use the network more cheaply than Satoshi Dice users?  They're both using the same resources.  But this is more of a point of opinion than anything.

If any individual miner or pool agrees with Luke-Jr, then the solution for them is simple: Set their miners or pools to only accept SD transactions which meet whatever arbitrary criteria they believe is fair.  Maybe this is a higher fee, in which case they should notify SD of the change, so that SD can choose whether to pay a higher fee to be included in their blocks.  Maybe this is the belief that SD is the scum of the earth, and they will never process SD transactions.  That's ok too - it is entirely their decision.  The rest of the miners will continue to set other arbitrary rules for what transactions are accepted or denied when they hit a block.

[Prattler]

Why do "normal" users deserve to use the network more cheaply than Satoshi Dice users?  They're both using the same resources.  But this is more of a point of opinion than anything.

Because of the network effect and how it reinforces bitcoin. Every new bitcoin user is more valuable than the previous one. The usefulness of the system grows as ~n². The usefulness of the system grows ~ n^k, where k > 1.

[Daily Anarchist]

Why do "normal" users deserve to use the network more cheaply than Satoshi Dice users?  They're both using the same resources.  But this is more of a point of opinion than anything.

Because of the network effect and how it reinforces bitcoin. Every new bitcoin user is more valuable than the previous one. The usefulness of the system grows as ~n². The usefulness of the system grows ~ n^k, where k > 1.

How does this have anything to do with the conversation?

[OneMINER]

I wish we could get away from the subject of fees, that's really not what we are talking about. You could pay huge fees and still put a bunch of crap on the blockchain. The only people (or person) the fees affect is the miner(s) that found the block. Not the EVERYBODY ELSE that has a copy of the blockchain.

I agree that the amount of data being generated now isn't a problem. We can probably handle larger blocks without issue. But if you read that and conclude that it doesn't matter at all what goes into the blockchain then you are just dead wrong.

[Daily Anarchist]

Is there a thread or active debate on the topic of whether or not some fees should be kicked down to those who run full nodes?

A lot of the debate is around people who are unhappy downloading and storing "spam" on their computers. What if they were getting kicked a piece of the pie? Would that shut them up?

[OhShei8e]

Seriously,

Seriously BTC price breaks at the same moment when the limit was reached. Surely just a coincidence.

Nevertheless people not only play SD. They invest too. But if they have to realize that BTC don't work as usual they consider their investments. For me SD is an important benchmark at the moment. Maybe the fees are to low, maybe SD is a community aberration but I guess not. I think it is wrong to allow the miners to determine such an important value like the block size and let them hinder the monetary investments by endanger the health of the network while they collect excessive fees. Thus they become highwayman. At the end everyone lose.

IMHO we will need a 1.0 version to communicate and fix this.

Curious to see what happens now.

We all benefit from a strong rise in the price. Fees can not compensate that. A permanent transaction limit will limit the Bitcoin permanent. The Bitcoin has to work for everyone. That is its strength.

[zebedee]

Hi Mike,

I'm glad to answer any questions you have.  If I get time, I ought to write a FAQ to supplement the paper.

There is only one global chain.

The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide.  Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost.  It never really hits a scale ceiling.  If you're interested, I can go over the ways it would cope with extreme size.

By Moore's Law, we can expect hardware speed to be 10 times faster in 5 years and 100 times faster in 10.  Even if Bitcoin grows at crazy adoption rates, I think computer speeds will stay ahead of the number of transactions.

I don't anticipate that fees will be needed anytime soon, but if it becomes too burdensome to run a node, it is possible to run a node that only processes transactions that include a transaction fee.  The owner of the node would decide the minimum fee they'll accept.  Right now, such a node would get nothing, because nobody includes a fee, but if enough nodes did that, then users would get faster acceptance if they include a fee, or slower if they don't.  The fee the market would settle on should be minimal.  If a node requires a higher fee, that node would be passing up all transactions with lower fees.  It could do more volume and probably make more money by processing as many paying transactions as it can.  The transition is not controlled by some human in charge of the system though, just individuals reacting on their own to market forces.

Eventually, most nodes may be run by specialists with multiple GPU cards.  For now, it's nice that anyone with a PC can play without worrying about what video card they have, and hopefully it'll stay that way for a while.  More computers are shipping with fairly decent GPUs these days, so maybe later we'll transition to that.

Thanks Mike, that's very interesting, Satoshi truly got it.  And it's interesting he foresaw GPU mining back in early 2009, as I've seen others claim he didn't expect that.

[Raoul Duke]

OK, there is a patch for miners to blacklist SD tx's from being included in blocks...
What about a patch for normal nodes to blacklist the relaying/verification of SD tx's and drop them without relaying/verifying? It will for sure help normal users like me who want to run well-connected full nodes and save some cpu cycles and bandwidth by not relaying/verifying the SD spam.
1 BTC from me to whoever does it, if possible at all.

[gmaxwell]

Code:

diff --git a/src/main.cpp b/src/main.cpp
index 9a06dbf..d3fba73 100644
--- a/src/main.cpp
+++ b/src/main.cpp
@@ -384,8 +384,16 @@ bool CTransaction::IsStandard() const
     BOOST_FOREACH(const CTxOut& txout, vout) {
         if (!::IsStandard(txout.scriptPubKey))
             return false;
+        if (txout.scriptPubKey.size() > 6
+         && txout.scriptPubKey[0] == OP_DUP
+         && txout.scriptPubKey[3] == 0x06
+         && txout.scriptPubKey[4] == 0xf1
+         && txout.scriptPubKey[5] == 0xb6)
+            return error("CTransaction::IsStandard : ignoring transaction with 1dice output");
         if (txout.nValue == 0)
-            return false;
+            return error("CTransaction::IsStandard : ignoring transaction with 0 value output");
+        if (txout.nValue <= 10000)
+            return error("CTransaction::IsStandard : ignoring transaction with dust output");
     }
     return true;
 }

You may not be interested in the if (txout.nValue <= 10000)  test, though it also gets the dice you-lost transactions and other UXTO set bloating flood.

This will make the node not relay or mine these transactions. It will, of course, still accept them in blocks.