I for one am happy the Network is rejecting more and more SD spam.
+1
+1
All the nodes I run are modified to refuse to relay transactions that include a known Satoshi Dice address (along with other known spamming addresses).
could you explain to a newb why SD is spam? i just seen a link for it on blockchain.info and fell for it like a sucker. is this a known scam or something?
Not scam. spam.
The problem is in the model they've chosen for their business.
They send around these miniscule value transactions that you won't be able to easily spend for years, using them as a messaging system to let you know that they've processed your bet. Your wallet fills up with these tiny outputs, and then one day you go to create a transaction to send to someone. Suddenly your wallet is requiring you to spend 0.15 BTC in fees to send 0.01 BTC to someone, and you don't understand why. Now you're pissed at bitcoin, and at your wallet provider for forcing these fees on you and "stealing" your bitcoins. Meanwhile its the fault of SD. They know how the protocol works. They know that their transactions are having this long term affect on their customer's wallets. They just don't care, because by the time you realize it, the house edge will have already worked its mathematics and they'll have their profits from you.
They send the winnings back to whatever address you send the bet "from". This works ok with wallets like Electrum, MultiBit, Bitcoin-Qt, and blockchain, but then a customer tries to play from their MtGox wallet or some other shared wallet service. When they win they discover that instead of coming back to them, the bitcoins disappeared into some address owned/controlled by the provider of the shared wallet service. Lots of complaining and upset. People getting angry at bitcoin.
If they ran their business better, you could send everything you want to bet with to them in a single transaction. Then your bets could all be processed internally until you're ready to cash out, much like how MtGox handles funding, trading, and cashing out with bitcoins. Then you could make 10,000 bets and it would only add 2 transactions to the blockchain. Instead SD uses the blockchain like their own personal message service. Every single bet is permanently recorded in the blockchain, taking up space on the hard drive of every single fully participating node on the network. When someone wants to start up a new node, they have to synchronize and re-process/re-validate every single one of those bets all over again.
All those unspent tiny payments letting people know that they've lost a bet? Every one of them has to be stored in the UTXO list of every node so they can be prepared just in case a transaction comes through that tries to spend one of them.
It bloats the blockchain, and creates a situation where there isn't enough space left for all the waiting transactions. Then some transactions have to wait around until a block comes along that has enough space left over. Confirmation times increase for everyone, and we all start paying higher transaction fees jsut to get our transactions confirmed in a reasonable amount of time.
