Oh god, I see a chance for lifting the 1M block size limit !!!

[johnyj]

What if the some people get their way and the limit is increased to say 100MB per block.
If you're a miner, what would you do? Would you accept 1000s of free requests? Hell no! Compel users to put in proper bids. You need to earn a living too!
However, what happens with all that spare capacity? Most miners will keep rejecting those "free bids"... until it's a 'rogue' miner's turn to discover a block. What do they do? They dip into the "infinite memory heap" where 80k transaction requests have accumulated, and they accept the lot!

It's a lot more ugly than that. If there is spare capacity you can use it for something quite different than just cheap transactions; unfortunately fundamentally transactions are just data, and there is nothing we can do to prevent people from stuffing data that has nothing to do with finance at all into transactions, and thus blocks.

Thus with large blocks and cheap blockchain space you can offer a really useful service, lets call it "Google Chain Storage", the only backup service in the world that comes with the guarantee that you know you data is safe, every time you perform a successful transaction.

Technically speaking, what you do is you create a transaction with the following scriptPubKey:

Code:

OP_HASH160 <20 byte digest> OP_EQUALVERIFY <data>

In theory it can be spent by providing the data that when hashed has the 20 byte digest provided, so nodes can never prune the transaction from their databases. Of course, in reality you would just generate the digests randomly. The data payload can be up to 9974 bytes long for every transaction. At 0.1 cents per KB fees - what people were paying a few months ago - putting 1MB of junk into the blockchain forever would only cost a dollar. There are lots of people with data valuable enough that paying $1000/GB to be absolutely sure it is backed up makes sense.

Even if you try to combat the horridly abusive stuff like the above with a hard-fork that changes the rules to disable anything but the small set of standard transactions, there's still timestamping. Again the easiest way to do it is to just send a tiny amount of funds to an address that's actually a digest of the data you want to timestamp, and again the demand for time-stamping is more than enough to fill any blocksize you want.

Thanks for bring all these up, you should not demonstrate how to abuse the system  

I'm bit more confident that the community will solve such kind of problem given their fast and professional reaction this time

[Prattler]

What if the some people get their way and the limit is increased to say 100MB per block.
If you're a miner, what would you do? Would you accept 1000s of free requests? Hell no! Compel users to put in proper bids. You need to earn a living too!
However, what happens with all that spare capacity? Most miners will keep rejecting those "free bids"... until it's a 'rogue' miner's turn to discover a block. What do they do? They dip into the "infinite memory heap" where 80k transaction requests have accumulated, and they accept the lot!

It's a lot more ugly than that. If there is spare capacity you can use it for something quite different than just cheap transactions; unfortunately fundamentally transactions are just data, and there is nothing we can do to prevent people from stuffing data that has nothing to do with finance at all into transactions, and thus blocks.

Thus with large blocks and cheap blockchain space you can offer a really useful service, lets call it "Google Chain Storage", the only backup service in the world that comes with the guarantee that you know you data is safe, every time you perform a successful transaction.


Technically speaking, what you do is you create a transaction with the following scriptPubKey:

Code:

OP_HASH160 <20 byte digest> OP_EQUALVERIFY <data>

In theory it can be spent by providing the data that when hashed has the 20 byte digest provided, so nodes can never prune the transaction from their databases. Of course, in reality you would just generate the digests randomly. The data payload can be up to 9974 bytes long for every transaction. At 0.1 cents per KB fees - what people were paying a few months ago - putting 1MB of junk into the blockchain forever would only cost a dollar. There are lots of people with data valuable enough that paying $1000/GB to be absolutely sure it is backed up makes sense.

Even if you try to combat the horridly abusive stuff like the above with a hard-fork that changes the rules to disable anything but the small set of standard transactions, there's still timestamping. Again the easiest way to do it is to just send a tiny amount of funds to an address that's actually a digest of the data you want to timestamp, and again the demand for time-stamping is more than enough to fill any blocksize you want.

Thank you retep for thinking about bitcoin scalability and sustainability long term! Everyone should read this.

[markm]

-- velocity (and by extension: the exchange rate) is sky-high because of all the cheap/free TX requests being accepted.

Whoa, explain how velocity increases exchange rates?

Surely velocity means the same coin can be used by more people in less time?

So more people manage to get their greek village parable circle of trade to go round with less coins.

So they don't need to buy as many coins per village.

How does that increase exchange rates?

-MarkM-

[Monster Tent]

Upgrading the block size because of a bug doesnt show forward planning and should have been scheduled 6 months ago to avoid a fork.

Having a fork everytime the network bumps against the max block size isnt a good idea either.

[benjamindees]

The value of Bitcoin is the value represented by the Bitcoin economy.  The Bitcoin economy creates value just like any other economy, by voluntary specialization and trade.  Higher velocity means more specialization and trade, and thus higher value.

Just ignore exchange rates.  It has nothing to do with exchange.

[markm]

The value of Bitcoin is the value represented by the Bitcoin economy.  The Bitcoin economy creates value just like any other economy, by voluntary specialization and trade.  Higher velocity means more specialization and trade, and thus higher value.

Just ignore exchange rates.  It has nothing to do with exchange.

Ah, okay, got you. If that tourist had wanted to buy all the services all the villagers had managed to sell to each other with his money while his back was turned, it would have cost him a heck of a lot more money than just that one "coin" they used for a few minutes behind his back and returned to him.

-MarkM-

[Prattler]

Having a fork everytime the network bumps against the max block size isnt a good idea either.

This is the best idea.

Full block space will always be occupied by spam. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons. Network RAM/HDD/CPU is a limited and expensive resource, but miners have every incentive to deplete it (personal gain, costs shared by others). Bitcoin can survive the tragedy of the commons by scheduling how fast the limited resources are being depleted and keeping it lower than technology advancement.

There is currently no mechanism to force miners to pay for the network resources, they have to be limited through the block size limit.

[markm]

Ok but that doesn't address money/currency velocity at all.

-MarkM-

[benjamindees]

This discussion is kind of like arguing about the number of angels on the head of a pin, since the effects you're concerned about are greatly overshadowed by 1) miner block reward subsidies that have created an overly-strong network, 2) historically low transaction volume, and 3) massive speculative investment.

[rebroad]

Before I thought that's the most troublesome topic in bitcoin, but now this bug in BDB opened a window to lift that limit, Gavin you are so lucky! 

If I ever find myself owning things claiming to be bitcoins but that allow blocksizes over 1MB, I will be selling them all, and keeping the official bitcoins,,,!