WARNING! Bitcoin will soon block small transaction outputs

[ProfMac]

And of course it is worth re-quoting,

This pull request is the first step towards a market between miners (who want higher fees) and merchants/users (who want lower fees, but also want their transactions confirmed). Miners can already control what fees they accept, this pull lets users control (very clumsily, improvements on the road map) the fee they are willing to pay.

Please re-read this before complaining

Is there a web page that gives some statistics on fees in a block?

The most interesting thing, I think, would be a plot of fee size and the delay before the transaction was included.

[1714257004]

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[1714257004]

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[ProfMac]

You idiots know it's just a default setting that can be changed, right?

You can just change this in the config, and connect to a few nodes in pools that accept non-standard tx's.

+1

Knock yourselves out, no fork needed, just add this to your bitcoin.conf and convince a few big miners or mining pools to do the same:

    minrelaytxfee=0

Wow dude, you are a fucking Nazi.  Do as I say BITCOIN!

I'm done here if this change is made.  No one dictates what I should or shouldn't send.  I don't give a fuck who you are.

The way I read Gavin's comment, it is completely trivial to do as you want, just put another line in bitcoin.conf.

[ProfMac]

I think I might set my dust limit way high like

Code:

minrelaytxfee=0.01

I'm sick of carrying around a whole lot of everybody else's crap. When you exist on dial-up connection and old hardware you might appreciate what the cost of TX actually are. Maybe a lot of the people spouting off about this are actually spoiled brats with high-end rigs and fibre-optic connections living on free electricity?  

Then you shouldn't even be using a full node, go use a lightweight node, otherwise I see no reason to complain.

What?! Are you trying to censor me off the blockchain just because I have dial-up and old hardware? [sarc]Facist nazi rich prick![/sarc]

Is there a market for a DVD of the blockchain to bootstrap people with challenging circumstances?  Today, I have fiber optic to the wall of the house, it terminates within 3' of where I am typing.  My mother has a parcel of land next to her farm and it might be good for me to live close to her as she is getting old and lives alone, it is on a dialup.  I don't think I become less savvy or less important if I want to think about her safety and welfare.

[ProfMac]

why the fuck would you send less than 5uBTC to ANYBODY?

My noob impression is that, if I send 1.000 000 00 BTC out, pay 0.001 000 000 BTC in fees, and I have 2 unspent transactions in my wallet of
0.005 000 00 BTC and 0.006 000 03 BTC, I think I will generate an output of 0.000 000 03 BTC as change.

[jdillon]

It's a pity read this assert.

The most useful thing of bitcoin is micropays. If you block them, bitcoin lose its main value and a new coin should enter the game.

Micropays...

Not freedom from authority, not an inflation-proof digital asset, not anonymity, not democracy, but buying ringtones over the internet.

You lot are hilarious.

[Le Happy Merchant]

Not a file sharing, but distributed DHT-like database HASH=BLOCK

DHT you say?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrotestosterone

Edit: I also think this change is rash.

[kokjo]

Not a file sharing, but distributed DHT-like database HASH=BLOCK

DHT you say?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrotestosterone

Edit: I also think this change is rash.

tard! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table

[Shevek]

It's a pity read this assert.

The most useful thing of bitcoin is micropays. If you block them, bitcoin lose its main value and a new coin should enter the game.

Micropays...

Not freedom from authority, not an inflation-proof digital asset, not anonymity, not democracy, but buying ringtones over the internet.

Think whatever you want, but the real hook to catch people who wants to trade with bitcoin (not speculate, hoard, invest, and so on) is the possibility paying small amounts without commission penalties.

Bitcoin is for trade... isn't it?

You lot are hilarious.

I also love you.

[bitcoinget]

Anyone know when 0.8.2 gets released?

[jgarzik]

Anyone know when 0.8.2 gets released?

Hopefully the first release candidate, will full release notes, will be posted soon (days not weeks).

[jdbtracker]

Is there a web page that gives some statistics on fees in a block?

blockchain.info

Is there a market for a DVD of the blockchain to bootstrap people with challenging circumstances?  Today, I have fiber optic to the wall of the house, it terminates within 3' of where I am typing.  My mother has a parcel of land next to her farm and it might be good for me to live close to her as she is getting old and lives alone, it is on a dialup.  I don't think I become less savvy or less important if I want to think about her safety and welfare.

yup copy it from the bitcoin directory called Blocks in windows 7 C:\Users\users\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin

and for the last question. yes you get .00000003 in change, but that is a good point, would that change be blocked with a .00005430 limit?

[bg002h]

The more people who run a full node, the greater the decentralization[1][2].

I can't run a full node full time right now because there is no upload throttling. The Bitcoin client slows my Internet down to literally unusable (4sec+ pings).

Not because of hard drive space. I've got 900 GB free right now.

What kind of Internet connection do you have? I'm running a full node on a refurb low end Mac mini...I can't tell that I'm running it...I do have a 100mbit/s connection, but I think I would do fine with 1/10 that.

[solex]

and for the last question. yes you get .00000003 in change, but that is a good point, would that change be blocked with a .00005430 limit?

OK. I'll bite. General question:

Why can't it be a standard feature of wallets that, during preparation of a transaction, any utxo < coin_dust is eliminated and the dust amount added to the transaction fee. Surely, this would help prevent a lot of the new dust spam causing blockchain bloat. Does any wallet do this?

[astutiumRob]

It increases the costs of that dataset that cannot be pruned

There's no real reason the dataset cannot be pruned - i've been playing with a DB copy of a blockchain, looking at ways of "removing" the records for accounts with a nil balance (amount out = total amounts in) where date is > 30 days ago

I don't *need* as a _user_ of bitcoins the whole blockchain, if I could get "balances at point in time" and the journal entries after that.

I similarly dont really *need* (although I might _choose) to have all my addresses maintain a chain of completed transactions - if I could have a way to "move" the balance to another address within my wallet, I could then "discard" that address.

My "real life" wallet doesnt care which ATM each of the notes came out of, I have a "balance" (occasionally) in there I can spend - in fact having that "tracking" decreases anonymity significantly.

A lightweight client is a key to mass adoption (amongst a number of other things).

It's great that my children can empty a moneybox and see a £2 coin and know from the year "that was the one from Grandma on my 6th birthday". It rapidly becomes irrelevant when its a pile of coins getting spent on a beachball - getting the sand out of your shoes becomes much more pressing. In the same way I dont need to know that 4mBTC came from me testing -QT to a non QT client - it's just 4mBTC to be spent, which due to the size and age of the bitcoins will probably cost me more in fees to use than its worth.

Imagine buying a car for £5000 and taking 500x£10 notes to the deaer but you find they cant sell it to you because they came from 702 different amounts of change from your wages, and some are "worth" less when spending than £10 because they're notes only printed that morning, or were made up of 200x5p transactions... in the "real" world £5k is £5k is £5k not some variable equivalent that might eventually be 5k

 

[marcus_of_augustus]

Imagine buying a car for £5000 and taking 500x£10 notes to the deaer but you find they cant sell it to you because they came from 702 different amounts of change from your wages, and some are "worth" less when spending than £10 because they're notes only printed that morning, or were made up of 200x5p transactions... in the "real" world £5k is £5k is £5k not some variable equivalent that might eventually be 5k

Yes, this is another manifestation of the weak fungibility problem of bitcoin ... that also manifests as pseudo-anonymity and not strong anonymity. I think Satoshi mentions something about lightweight clients only keeping the previous 2 TX records deep for each coin in the DB.

[DeathAndTaxes]

It increases the costs of that dataset that cannot be pruned

There's no real reason the dataset cannot be pruned - i've been playing with a DB copy of a blockchain, looking at ways of "removing" the records for accounts with a nil balance (amount out = total amounts in) where date is > 30 days ago

I think you misunderstand.  Nobody is saying the blockchain can't be pruned.  IT CAN be pruned however the UXTO (set of unspent outputs which can still be inputs for future txs) CAN'T be pruned.  That is fine because generally the UXTO is going to grow slower than the blockchain (people tend to spend unspent outputs creating roughly the same number of unspent outputs).  There is one exception.  That is UNECONOMICAL outputs.

If you have a 0.0000001 output but it would cost 100x as much in fees to spend it would you spend it?  Of course not.  Kinda like mailing a penny (at a cost of $0.46) to your bank to apply to your mortgage principal.  Nobody does that it doesn't make economical sense.  So these uneconomically outputs are likely NEVER going to be spent.  Each one that is produced won't be spent and thus won't be pruned and will remain in the UXTO forever (or a very long time on average) this is causing the UXTO to bloat and will continue to bloat as there is no reason for anyone to ever spend these outputs (and spending is what allows an output to be pruned).

The UXTO is the critical resources.  In order to validate tx quickly the UXTO needs to be in memory.  So what happens when the UXTO is 32GB? 64GB? 200GB?  Now if those are "valid" outputs likely to be used in future tx well that is just the cost of being a full node.  But when 50%, 70%, 95%+ of the outputs are just unspendable garbage it greatly increases the processing requirements of full nodes without any benefit, to anyone.

I don't *need* as a _user_ of bitcoins the whole blockchain, if I could get "balances at point in time" and the journal entries after that.

Of course you don't which is the whole point of pruning the blockchain however you do need to retain a copy of every unspent output otherwise when you receive tx or block containing that output as an input in a new tx you can't validate the tx or block.  If the input is coming to you, you can't even know if the tx/block is valid or just some nonsense garbage that an attacker sent to trick you into thinking your got paid.

This unprunable dataset is a subset of the blockchain however tx below the dust thresholding simply bloat this.

[justusranvier]

In order to validate tx quickly the UXTO needs to be in memory.  So what happens when the UXTO is 32GB? 64GB? 200GB?  Now if those are "valid" outputs likely to be used in future tx well that is just the cost of being a full node.  But when 50%, 70%, 95%+ of the outputs are just unspendable garbage

...they'll get pushed to swap space along with all the other memory pages that haven't been accessed for a while? We expect caching algorithms and virtual memory to still be a thing in the future, right?

[gmaxwell]

The UXTO is the critical resources.  In order to validate tx quickly the UXTO needs to be in memory.  So what happens when the UXTO is 32GB? 64GB? 200GB?  Now if those are "valid" outputs likely to be used in future tx well that is just the cost of being a full node.  But when 50%, 70%, 95%+ of the outputs are just unspendable garbage it greatly increases the processing requirements of full nodes without any benefit, to anyone.

It doesn't need to be in _ram_ in needs to be in fast reliable storage— online storage not nearline or offline, not on a tape jukebox in the basement or on on far away storage across a WAN—, and the validation time depends on how fast it is. If you put it on storage with a 10ms random access time and your block has 2000 transactions with 10 inputs each, you're looking at 200 seconds just to fetch the inputs which is just going to utterly really bad network convergence and cause a ton of hashrate loss due to forks and make people need more confirmations for security.  But in practice it's not quite that bad since _hopefully_ a lot of spent outputs were recently created.

The 'memory' stuff is mostly a tangent, the issue is that the utxo data can't be pruned. All full validators must have access to it— bloat in this dataset pressures people to run SPV nodes instead of full validators... which risks a loss of decenteralization, loss of motivations by miners to behave honestly, etc.

[Peter Todd]

It doesn't need to be in _ram_ in needs to be in fast reliable storage— online storage not nearline or offline, not on a tape jukebox in the basement or on on far away storage across a WAN—, and the validation time depends on how fast it is. If you put it on storage with a 10ms random access time and your block has 2000 transactions with 10 inputs each, you're looking at 200 seconds just to fetch the inputs which is just going to utterly really bad network convergence and cause a ton of hashrate loss due to forks and make people need more confirmations for security.  But in practice it's not quite that bad since _hopefully_ a lot of spent outputs were recently created.

The fact that usually it works because most of the outputs were recently created is incredibly dangerous. If the ratio of best case to worst case performance gets bad enough the attacker just has to come along with a block spending outputs that weren't recently created, or otherwise picked in a way where retrieval happens to be slow, to knock slower miners offline. Even worse is if they can come up with two blocks where each of those blocks trigger performance problems on one implementation but not the other they can split the network. They don't even have to mine those blocks themselves if the transactions in them are standard enough that they can get someone else to mine them.

In Bitcoin any performance problem can become a serious security problem. We only get away with it now because computers are so fast in comparison to the transaction volume and 10 minute target, but if we start needing to "optimize" things, including solutions like aggressively passing around transaction hashes rather than transactions themselves when a new block is propagated, we open ourselves up to serious security problems.

[ecliptic]

So is this basicaly because there is highly illegal shit like CP embedded in the blockchain forever via nano-transactions?

Of course this would never be admitted, but it comes right on the heels of rumors of its use for this purpose