Again, a block with 0 transactions is accepted

[mezzomix]

This is a temporary problem, so why risk breaking the protocol with a change?

I'm not changing the protocol. It's my local decision to not relay a block or not. It is a similar change as the dust prevention in 0.8.2 for transactions. It's my local choice to relay transactions and blocks. You are right, in 20-30 years this might be no problem anymore. but as long as the block reward is high, I'm will not spent my bandwith to support miners that do not include (my) transactions.

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[bezzeb]

This is a temporary problem, so why risk breaking the protocol with a change?

I'm not changing the protocol. It's my local decision to not relay a block or not. It is a similar change as the dust prevention in 0.8.2 for transactions. It's my local choice to relay transactions and blocks. You are right, in 20-30 years this might be no problem anymore. but as long as the block reward is high, I'm will not spent my bandwith to support miners that do not include (my) transactions.

On the flip side, you could think of like this:  "More fees for me!"  Personally, when I mine, I want to suck up as many fees as possible......  Problem solved - leave all the fee mining to me. 

Hmm.. that's a great idea - I WISH everyone but me would stop processing transactions and just submit zero blocks!  Might only have a verification every year or so (if I'm lucky) and it would be one monster of a giant block....  But man the fees would be awesome.... 

My precious fees......  Precious....

[mezzomix]

I'm not mining. I operate a bunch of dedicated servers in different locations that run full clients and are optimized to support a large number of connections. The fee is not interesting for me. A miner that is not including transactions is working against my goals. Why should I relay his transactions?

[jackjack]

I'm not mining. I operate a bunch of dedicated servers in different locations that run full clients and are optimized to support a large number of connections. The fee is not interesting for me. A miner that is not including transactions is working against my goals. Why should I relay his transactions blocks?

Just don't relay them

[bezzeb]

I'm not mining. I operate a bunch of dedicated servers in different locations that run full clients and are optimized to support a large number of connections. The fee is not interesting for me. A miner that is not including transactions is working against my goals. Why should I relay his transactions blocks?

As jackjack stated and assuming the last word of your above post was "blocks", then I guess you're talking about suppressing one tx blocks (zero customer tx) from entry into the chain, which indeed you could do.  I'd be very impressed (verging on deeply disturbed) if you control enough of the network though to do this effectively.  8|

And stating the obvious, I guess you couldn't be talking about ignoring "approved" zero blocks as that would break your copy of the blockchain.

In the end, I'm not bothered either way 'cause the bitcoin project has much bigger fish to fry unfortunately.  I think the issue behind this post is like earth in the HHGTG:  "Mostly Harmless".

On the side, you seem like a good person to ask.  I'm going to be setting up some full clients also as a token of support for the project, do you know of a handy "best practices" guide to setting up a good strong node that helps the network?  (port forwarding rules, hardware, bandwidth needs, etc..)  I operate a lot of datacenters and computers around the world, and would be happy to contribute more stability than my randomly on/off laptops running the qt client can contribute.  I have searched the forum, wiki.it and web for stuff like "best practices bitcoin qt" and have come up with zilch.  I'd rather not fiddle - I just want to set them up nicely to let them run indefinitely with maybe GIT set up to make updates easier to pull if possible.  I don't want this as a new hobby, tips very welcome.

[jackjack]

I'm not mining. I operate a bunch of dedicated servers in different locations that run full clients and are optimized to support a large number of connections. The fee is not interesting for me. A miner that is not including transactions is working against my goals. Why should I relay his transactions blocks?

As jackjack stated and assuming the last word of your above post was "blocks", then I guess you're talking about suppressing one tx blocks (zero customer tx) from entry into the chain, which indeed you could do.  I'd be very impressed (verging on deeply disturbed) if you control enough of the network though to do this effectively.  8|

Maybe that can delay that empty block enough to allow a nearly-simultaneous block to be accepted before it
That's highly improbable but if more and more people do this that may have a small impact

[mezzomix]

I'm not mining. I operate a bunch of dedicated servers in different locations that run full clients and are optimized to support a large number of connections. The fee is not interesting for me. A miner that is not including transactions is working against my goals. Why should I relay his transactions blocks?

As jackjack stated and assuming the last word of your above post was "blocks", then I guess you're talking about suppressing one tx blocks (zero customer tx) from entry into the chain, which indeed you could do.  I'd be very impressed (verging on deeply disturbed) if you control enough of the network though to do this effectively.  8|

Maybe that can delay that empty block enough to allow a nearly-simultaneous block to be accepted before it
That's highly improbable but if more and more people do this that may have a small impact

This!

I changed my bitcoind copy to not relay the last block if it is small (I use a fixed value here) and my local transaction pool has much more transactions than the number of transactions in this block at the time I received this block.

If I'm the only one doing this, the effect is small. If a lot of people are filtering blocks with this method the small number of bad pool operators will be too late with some blocks and loose this block fee. This is an advantage for miners including user transactions in their blocks and an advantage for the other bitcoin users.

[jackjack]

I'm not mining. I operate a bunch of dedicated servers in different locations that run full clients and are optimized to support a large number of connections. The fee is not interesting for me. A miner that is not including transactions is working against my goals. Why should I relay his transactions blocks?

As jackjack stated and assuming the last word of your above post was "blocks", then I guess you're talking about suppressing one tx blocks (zero customer tx) from entry into the chain, which indeed you could do.  I'd be very impressed (verging on deeply disturbed) if you control enough of the network though to do this effectively.  8|

Maybe that can delay that empty block enough to allow a nearly-simultaneous block to be accepted before it
That's highly improbable but if more and more people do this that may have a small impact

This!

I changed my bitcoind copy to not relay the last block if it is small (I use a fixed value here) and my local transaction pool has much more transactions than the number of transactions in this block at the time I received this block.

If I'm the only one doing this, the effect is small. If a lot of people are filtering blocks with this method the small number of bad pool operators will be too late with some blocks and loose this block fee. This is an advantage for miners including user transactions in their blocks and an advantage for the other bitcoin users.

I plan to do the same thing in the following days

[mezzomix]

First thing is, I build bitcoind and not bitcoin-qt as a support node. It makes no sense to run the QT version if you only operate a support node. Then I changed the max number of connections to 2000 and made some quick and dirty hacks to make sure the bitcoin client runs with a large number of connections and relay transactions and block according to my local policy. In the firewall setup I make sure that connections to the bitcoind port can reach my running bitcoind and that bitcoind can reach the rest of the world. Up to a few hundred connections you can just start an unchanged headless bitcoind with a larger number of connections setup the firewall and you are done.

[mootinator]

Interestingly, this makes yet another a good argument against the 'ASICS are ruining bitcoin' doomsayers.

Botnets should become increasingly useless with the deluge of people who are intentionally mining with specialized hardware.