Should the bitcoin community ban the Satoshi Dice filter patch?

[justusranvier]

If miners refuse to do their job in filtering, there's no reason to leave it up to miners.
Regular participating nodes can refuse to relay blocks with (eg) more than 50% Dice spam.

Let me get this straight: a blockchain fork caused by the fixing of an unknown bug should be fixed ASAP. On the other hand the blockchain should be deliberately forked because not all miners agree with you?

[nelisky]

If anything, we should be banning miners who refuse to do reasonable filtering like this.

Banning is such a strong word, though. If a majority of miners would in fact refuse such transactions other smaller miners would start getting a lot of orphans and would be forced to either reduce their blocksize drastically or starts filtering out what goes in to their mined blocks. But that's only if the majority of miners sees that as a good thing for the network and their bottom line, no?

If miners refuse to do their job in filtering, there's no reason to leave it up to miners.
Regular participating nodes can refuse to relay blocks with (eg) more than 50% Dice spam.

Even better! So the people that in theory are the ones losing out from all this have the power to do something about it!

A new kind of poll is born, a client that does filtered relaying where the user can opt as to what kind of filtering to apply gives that user a vote. Then it is not just he said, she said, it's actually measuring user opinion.

But having clients decide on their own relay rules opens a whole new can of worms, of course, and will ultimately open a new angle of attack against bitcoin stability. It does present an interesting case, perhaps worth discussing further.

[BitcoinAshley]

So wait, the Psy theory is the following:
Major bug in network. Don't actually fix it, simply expect the company taking advantage of it to stop taking advantage of it out of the kindness of their hearts. Then, proceed to exercise monumental amounts of naivety by assuming that no other website will come along and start to do the same exact thing. When they do, instead of fixing the bug, simply come on bitcointalk.org and whine and whine about it instead of fixing the bug. The (by then 100+) websites doing the exact same thing should simply stop doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. Rinse repeat. Never actually solve problem, just expect that it will solve itself if I whine about it enough. Don't fix flaws, just expect people not to aBTCuse them.

Psy, ...wtf? I can't even begin to wrap my mind around that.

That's like the Canadian people expecting the operators of the Exxon-Valdez vessel to pay for the environmental damage of the spill out of the kindness of their hearts, after passing a law specifically limiting the company's financial liability in case of a spill. It's nice, if you're in kindergarten, to expect the world to be all fluffy and happy and companies will simply not profit from loopholes and exemptions and little flaws that allow them to make more money.
This is not kindergarten. Expect that any flaw will be fully taken advantage of and abused, and must be taken care of like the SRS BSNS that it is.

[Luke-Jr]

If miners refuse to do their job in filtering, there's no reason to leave it up to miners.
Regular participating nodes can refuse to relay blocks with (eg) more than 50% Dice spam.

Let me get this straight: a blockchain fork caused by the fixing of an unknown bug should be fixed ASAP. On the other hand the blockchain should be deliberately forked because not all miners agree with you?

This topic has nothing to do with blockchain forking, period.

So wait, the Psy theory is the following:
Major bug in network. Don't actually fix it, simply expect the company taking advantage of it to stop taking advantage of it out of the kindness of their hearts. Then, proceed to exercise monumental amounts of naivety by assuming that no other website will come along and start to do the same exact thing. When they do, instead of fixing the bug, simply come on bitcointalk.org and whine and whine about it instead of fixing the bug. The (by then 100+) websites doing the exact same thing should simply stop doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. Rinse repeat. Never actually solve problem, just expect that it will solve itself if I whine about it enough. Don't fix flaws, just expect people not to aBTCuse them.

Psy, ...wtf? I can't even begin to wrap my mind around that.

That's like the Canadian people expecting the operators of the Exxon-Valdez vessel to pay for the environmental damage of the spill out of the kindness of their hearts, after passing a law specifically limiting the company's financial liability in case of a spill. It's nice, if you're in kindergarten, to expect the world to be all fluffy and happy and companies will simply not profit from loopholes and exemptions and little flaws that allow them to make more money.
This is not kindergarten. Expect that any flaw will be fully taken advantage of and abused, and must be taken care of like the SRS BSNS that it is.

The flaw is that miners aren't doing their job filtering spam. That's how the Bitcoin protocol deals with it.

[Raoul Duke]

So wait, the Psy theory is the following:
Major bug in network. Don't actually fix it, simply expect the company taking advantage of it to stop taking advantage of it out of the kindness of their hearts. Then, proceed to exercise monumental amounts of naivety by assuming that no other website will come along and start to do the same exact thing. When they do, instead of fixing the bug, simply come on bitcointalk.org and whine and whine about it instead of fixing the bug. The (by then 100+) websites doing the exact same thing should simply stop doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. Rinse repeat. Never actually solve problem, just expect that it will solve itself if I whine about it enough. Don't fix flaws, just expect people not to aBTCuse them.

Psy, ...wtf? I can't even begin to wrap my mind around that.

That's like the Canadian people expecting the operators of the Exxon-Valdez vessel to pay for the environmental damage of the spill out of the kindness of their hearts, after passing a law specifically limiting the company's financial liability in case of a spill. It's nice, if you're in kindergarten, to expect the world to be all fluffy and happy and companies will simply not profit from loopholes and exemptions and little flaws that allow them to make more money.
This is not kindergarten. Expect that any flaw will be fully taken advantage of and abused, and must be taken care of like the SRS BSNS that it is.

You put in my mouth a lot of words I didn't say...
That's to be expected.

[justusranvier]

If miners refuse to do their job in filtering, there's no reason to leave it up to miners.
Regular participating nodes can refuse to relay blocks with (eg) more than 50% Dice spam.

Let me get this straight: a blockchain fork caused by the fixing of an unknown bug should be fixed ASAP. On the other hand the blockchain should be deliberately forked because not all miners agree with you?

This topic has nothing to do with blockchain forking, period.

One faction in the network refusing to relay valid blocks has no potential to cause a fork?

[Luke-Jr]

If miners refuse to do their job in filtering, there's no reason to leave it up to miners.
Regular participating nodes can refuse to relay blocks with (eg) more than 50% Dice spam.

Let me get this straight: a blockchain fork caused by the fixing of an unknown bug should be fixed ASAP. On the other hand the blockchain should be deliberately forked because not all miners agree with you?

This topic has nothing to do with blockchain forking, period.

One faction in the network refusing to relay valid blocks has no potential to cause a fork?

If it gets big enough, it could cause a soft-fork. But that's a much different/smaller problem than a hardfork, and unlikely to occur (since miners would presumably get their act together before it got to this point).

Edit: The real problem with this idea, is how to coordinate undoing it when/if SD cleans up their service so that it stops flooding.

[justusranvier]

If it gets big enough, it could cause a soft-fork. But that's a much different/smaller problem than a hardfork, and unlikely to occur (since miners would presumably get their act together before it got to this point).

If half the network decides that blocks containing SD transactions are valid, and the other half decide they are invalid it would indeed be a hard fork.

There's no guarantee that it would go your way either.  The majority of the network might just continue processing those transactions and ignore your blocks until you get your act together.

[Luke-Jr]

If it gets big enough, it could cause a soft-fork. But that's a much different/smaller problem than a hardfork, and unlikely to occur (since miners would presumably get their act together before it got to this point).

If half the network decides that blocks containing SD transactions are valid, and the other half decide they are invalid it would indeed be a hard fork.

Notice I never suggested to consider them invalid. Just not relay them.

There's no guarantee that it would go your way either.  The majority of the network might just continue processing those transactions and ignore your blocks until you get your act together.

You mean Bitcoin's way. My miners are just doing their job filtering out spam, like they're supposed to as part of the Bitcoin system.
And if you start trying to force miners to accept transactions, you're breaking Bitcoin.
In this particular case, you'd in effect be creating a SD tax on miners.

[maximian]

My miners are just doing their job filtering out spam, like they're supposed to as part of the Bitcoin system.

My understanding is that SD no longer creates 1 satoshi transactions. The minimum it now sends is 5000 satoshis, which should help with the unspendable bit dust problem. Does that change your position on SD transactions?

[Luke-Jr]

My miners are just doing their job filtering out spam, like they're supposed to as part of the Bitcoin system.

My understanding is that SD no longer creates 1 satoshi transactions. The minimum it now sends is 5000 satoshis, which should help with the unspendable bit dust problem. Does that change your position on SD transactions?

Not at all. Those are still dust spam, and even if they never sent anything on losses, their "bet" and "win" transactions are still spam.

[justusranvier]

[Soros Shorts]

I used to be able to run a full node on a cheap $30/month VPS. When SD came along, I got banned for generating too much I/O.

Now I am paying a lot more to host my full node (almost 10x more). The cost includes an SSD partition for the blockchain database.

At some point I won't be willing to pay the minimum cost to operate a full node. Being able to filter out less important transactions might allow me to operate my node longer with my given budget. The alternative would be to take it completely offline.

Would it be better to go offline and relay nothing, or remain online and relay a subset of transactions?

[ShireSilver]

You mean Bitcoin's way. My miners are just doing their job filtering out spam, like they're supposed to as part of the Bitcoin system.

You don't seem to understand what bitcoin is. Satoshi Dice is the one actually using bitcoin correctly, unlike the other sites that require you to create an account and log in. Your Orwellian insistence on calling it spam doesn't put you in a good light. Please understand that bitcoin is making the old centralized ways of doing things obsolete, and we need to learn how to build new ways of doing things.

Centralization, which is required in systems that make you create accounts, leads inevitably to corruption. Satoshi Dice has found a way to work in the bitcoin system and not require centralization, which is a huge benefit to us all - regardless of some small inconveniences that you appear to want to whine about even though it isn't really a problem.

And as has been pointed out, your quest for vengeance against an upstanding citizen of the bitcoin economy has apparently killed an innocent victim. It is looking like the colored coin distributed asset management system is no longer viable. This would have been a huge boon to small businesses and individuals who might have used it to raise needed capital. Instead they will have to continue to rely on old outdated systems that are less efficient and can expose them to JBTs unnecessarily.

[justusranvier]

This would have been a huge boon to small businesses and individuals who might have used it to raise needed capital. Instead they will have to continue to rely on old outdated systems that are less efficient and can expose them to JBTs unnecessarily.

Apparently some key people involved with Bitcoin see this as a desirable outcome.

[pyra-proxy]

You mean Bitcoin's way. My miners are just doing their job filtering out spam, like they're supposed to as part of the Bitcoin system.

You don't seem to understand what bitcoin is. Satoshi Dice is the one actually using bitcoin correctly, unlike the other sites that require you to create an account and log in. Your Orwellian insistence on calling it spam doesn't put you in a good light. Please understand that bitcoin is making the old centralized ways of doing things obsolete, and we need to learn how to build new ways of doing things.

Centralization, which is required in systems that make you create accounts, leads inevitably to corruption. Satoshi Dice has found a way to work in the bitcoin system and not require centralization, which is a huge benefit to us all - regardless of some small inconveniences that you appear to want to whine about even though it isn't really a problem.

And as has been pointed out, your quest for vengeance against an upstanding citizen of the bitcoin economy has apparently killed an innocent victim. It is looking like the colored coin distributed asset management system is no longer viable. This would have been a huge boon to small businesses and individuals who might have used it to raise needed capital. Instead they will have to continue to rely on old outdated systems that are less efficient and can expose them to JBTs unnecessarily.

Your body and mind is centralized so therefore corrupted... please go and decentralize yourself to purge the corruption.  Have a nice day!

[HorseRider]

SD is a bitcoin business which is using the bitcoin network to wire money with real business intention (gambling). I do not see any problem with SD. Bitcoin should handle this problem, but not ban SD. If we need ban SD, I don't think bitcoin has the scalable future that most people once imaged.

[Gabi]

SD is a bitcoin business which is using the bitcoin network to wiring money with real business intention (gambling). I do not see any problem with SD. Bitcoin should handle this problem, but not ban SD. If we need ban SD, I don't think bitcoin has the scalable future that most people once imaged.

+1

[robocoin]

I just imagined a guy with enough money to drive a big PR campain against some sort of political enemy, that includes convincing miners to ignore all TXs relatated to the enemys BTC address. But that wouldn't really work? No?

For now it seams reasonable to filter out SDice. More complications to come.

[jgarzik]

SD is a bitcoin business which is using the bitcoin network to wire money with real business intention (gambling). I do not see any problem with SD. Bitcoin should handle this problem, but not ban SD. If we need ban SD, I don't think bitcoin has the scalable future that most people once imaged.

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.

People on IRC also claim that SD gambles against themselves to build their Most Popular Bitcoin Gambling Website brand, which would also bloat the blockchain, but there is no way of proving or disproving that rumor.