Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[domob]

Yes, but the ongoing spam shows clearly that all full nodes are handling the traffic just fine. We were told that they would crash and burn from overloaded memory. Not true.

Wait, wasn't that exactly Hearn's main argument in his "the sky is falling if we don't increase the blocksize" blog post?  So why do you see the fact that it did not prove true so far as supporting your position of increasing the block size?

[Peter R]

Yes, but the ongoing spam shows clearly that all full nodes are handling the traffic just fine. We were told that they would crash and burn from overloaded memory. Not true.

Wait, wasn't that exactly Hearn's main argument in his "the sky is falling if we don't increase the blocksize" blog post?  So why do you see the fact that it did not prove true so far as supporting your position of increasing the block size?

It provided evidence that the network can handle the increased load, and it confirmed that people do get frustrated by the confirmation delays. 

[sidhujag]

Let's face it If we want adoption by a cb we need more tx/s however we can solve other probs first before raising limit to efficiently come to that conclusion.

[gmaxwell]

I just want to highlight the comments here from bitcoin-dev today, which seem to indicate that these spamming attacks would have been 5.5x more expensive if a dust threshold software change had not been made. Perhaps there are deeper insights someone else has on this...?

16:53   wangchun   why can those spam get confirmed. 0.00001 BTC vout below dust threshold right?
16:54   phantomcircuit   wangchun, iirc the dust threshold is 546 satoshis
16:54   wangchun   not 5460 satoshis? changed?
16:54   aschildbach   wangchun: Yes it was cut by 10 a few months ago.

i don't think it really matters, does it?
since most of the mined blocks are filled with real demand trying to get into blocks with or without spamming,

Unfortunately, the majority in the blocks I checked earlier today have been the DOS attack-- e.g. transactions tracable from outputs of this transaction https://blockchain.info/tx/3bad15167c60de483cd32cb990d1e46f0a0d8ab380e3fc1cace01afc9c1bb5af  and a few others. ... though the attack style has been shifting to evade filtering by miners.

The change mentioned in the chat above is https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3305 (you might find the comments there interesting), it's one of Mikes couple contributions to Bitcoin Core.

[awemany]

Unfortunately, the majority in the blocks I checked earlier today have been the DOS attack-- e.g. transactions tracable from outputs of this transaction https://blockchain.info/tx/3bad15167c60de483cd32cb990d1e46f0a0d8ab380e3fc1cace01afc9c1bb5af  and a few others. ... though the attack style has been shifting to evade filtering by miners.

The change mentioned in the chat above is https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3305 (you might find the comments there interesting), it's one of Mikes couple contributions to Bitcoin Core.

So miners are filtering out the spam? What are they filtering for?

[sickpig]

Jeff Garzik has just posted 2 pull requests for bitcoin core on github:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6405
Remove TX priority and free transaction area from mempool, block creator.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6402
Floating network relay fee increase, if memory pool grows too large.

the latter will introduce, if merged, "a relay fee that adjusts to floods
which cause the memory pool to grow too large".

It seems that core devs start becoming aware of the lack of
of economic incentives for services provided by full nodes.

[solex]

Unfortunately, the majority in the blocks I checked earlier today have been the DOS attack-- e.g. transactions tracable from outputs of this transaction https://blockchain.info/tx/3bad15167c60de483cd32cb990d1e46f0a0d8ab380e3fc1cace01afc9c1bb5af  and a few others. ... though the attack style has been shifting to evade filtering by miners.

The change mentioned in the chat above is https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3305 (you might find the comments there interesting), it's one of Mikes couple contributions to Bitcoin Core.

Goddammit, Peter Todd hits the nail on the head! Kudos to him.
Yes, that 10x reduction looks to be unwise in hindsight. I recall the painful and protracted debate on bct just getting the dust threshold at 5460 sats in the first place.

So miners are filtering out the spam? What are they filtering for?

Hey, nice to see you in this thread.
It appeared that BitFury was aggressively filtering by fee when producing small 138KB blocks, however they have just mined a 998KB block (364549) which I think is their first near this size.

[TheRealSteve]

It appeared that BitFury was aggressively filtering by fee when producing small 138KB blocks, however they have just mined a 998KB block (364549) which I think is their first near this size.

Nah, there were also 364354, 364383, 364393 and 364398

[awemany]

So miners are filtering out the spam? What are they filtering for?

Hey, nice to see you in this thread.
It appeared that BitFury was aggressively filtering by fee when producing small 138KB blocks, however they have just mined a 998KB block (364549) which I think is their first near this size.

Hi! Yeah, I was always somewhat put off by the presentation here, too confusing, threads with too many pages. Have a couple of old accounts that I lost all login data for. On the other hand, Reddit is sometimes a bit shallow and fast scrolling...

So they did increase the fees then and not reduce their blocksize, it seems? That would make a lot more sense to me (from the miner's perspective).

[newb4now]

In the short run, miners will keep putting up with spam transactions because most of their revenue (great majority) is coming from the BTC block reward. As rewards become less and less and transaction volume (spam or legitimate) continues to increase the balance will gradually start to change.

Eventually miners will start to ignore transactions without some minimum transaction fee (which will change over time based on block reward/transaction fee balance).

This is a self correcting problem which miners will correct on their own (by only verifying transactions with some minimum fee)

We all expected this from the beginning. The blockchain will eventually be supported by transactions fees as block reward keeps dropping. The only thing that has changed is that miners may respond sooner because of all these spam transactions. Spam will stop once the miners raise the minimum fee enough (or spam transactions will continue but never be confirmed)

[cypherdoc]

Jeff Garzik has just posted 2 pull requests for bitcoin core on github:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6405
Remove TX priority and free transaction area from mempool, block creator.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6402
Floating network relay fee increase, if memory pool grows too large.

the latter will introduce, if merged, "a relay fee that adjusts to floods
which cause the memory pool to grow too large".

It seems that core devs start becoming aware of the lack of
of economic incentives for services provided by full nodes.

i hate to bring up an analogy from medicine since it may not be appropriate but i'll try nonetheless.

one of the greatest things i learned during my internship btwn med school and residency in eyes, is that too much intervention can cause problems for patients.  every 3 mo i'd rotate onto a new ward with responsibilities for about a couple of dozen gorked out patients.  i say gorked out b/c invariably all of them had at least a dozen meds onboard for a variety of reasons most of which had to do with sedation, pain, or anti-anxiety.  problem was, these meds unbeknownst to their previous physicians were preventing these ppl from getting better.  this was a repeating problem.  so the first thing i would do would be to cocentrate on stripping off as many of these unnecessary meds as possible.  much to everyone's amazement, these pts would perk up, turn around and start walking again, interacting with staff, feeling better, be more alert, and generally just get better to the pt i could discharge them.  and this experience happened over and over for me.  twas a great personal accomplishment for me and one i will never forget; don't over do it.

pt being, i still think the block size cap is the fundamental problem here.  more rules and limits that core dev piles on simply complicates the code and makes it more complex.  if anything, we should be stripping off rules and limits so that the free mkt can come to bear on many of these problems we are currently seeing.  the miners and users are perfectly capable of regulating the size of blocks and fees on their own.  if we lift the cap, the spam can actually help the network.  as long as spammers have to pay fees any spam attempts will line the pockets of miners and go back to growing the hashrate.  that would be a good thing and the last thing the spammers want to do.  no doubt they will try at first so we should expect even greater higher level attacks initially but in the long run, they will die off.  that's b/c their real objective is to disrupt new user growth which w/o a cap will be short circuited.  any further spam then will just help the tx mkt to grow, miners to profit, and yes, full nodes will eventually develop their own fee mkt too.  yes, full node capacities will have to grow but that should be viewed as a good thing b/c on the other end that will mean that miners are prospering (which is ok Greg) and user growth will be skyrocketing along with the price.  more merchants will come on board with new user growth and they will want and probably have a fiduciary responsibility to run their own full nodes which will add to network capacity.

so strip off rules and limits within reason, not add, and let BitcoinRun!

[cypherdoc]

Unfortunately, the majority in the blocks I checked earlier today have been the DOS attack-- e.g. transactions tracable from outputs of this transaction https://blockchain.info/tx/3bad15167c60de483cd32cb990d1e46f0a0d8ab380e3fc1cace01afc9c1bb5af  and a few others. ... though the attack style has been shifting to evade filtering by miners.

The change mentioned in the chat above is https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3305 (you might find the comments there interesting), it's one of Mikes couple contributions to Bitcoin Core.

So miners are filtering out the spam? What are they filtering for?

good question.  how do they distinguish? 

like i said above, w/o a block size cap, spam fees can actually pay to help grow the network and user base long term before it dies off. 

[inca]

There is quite the rumpus over on reddit over the blocksize debate. Reading this thread is a sea of calm reason in comparison.

Perhaps you could do a poll cypherdoc ..

EDIT: which is simply for / against blocksize scaling..

[cypherdoc]

China threatening short sellers.  Shades of US back in 2008.  the volatility back then makes Bitcoin look like cake:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-09/china-soars-most-2009-after-government-threatens-sellers-arrest-global-stocks-surge

[iCEBREAKER]

China threatening short sellers.  Shades of US back in 2008.  the volatility back then makes Bitcoin look like cake:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-09/china-soars-most-2009-after-government-threatens-sellers-arrest-global-stocks-surge

That's a good thing, because it ensures the economic crisis is over and Chinese companies will have plenty of capital to fund an explosion of bandwidth to homes.

Meanwhile, back in the real world...

[cypherdoc]

China threatening short sellers.  Shades of US back in 2008.  the volatility back then makes Bitcoin look like cake:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-09/china-soars-most-2009-after-government-threatens-sellers-arrest-global-stocks-surge

That's a good thing, because it ensures the economic crisis is over and Chinese companies will have plenty of capital to fund an explosion of bandwidth to homes.

Meanwhile, back in the real world...

I just want to highlight the comments here from bitcoin-dev today, which seem to indicate that these spamming attacks would have been 5.5x more expensive if a dust threshold software change had not been made. Perhaps there are deeper insights someone else has on this...?

16:53   wangchun   why can those spam get confirmed. 0.00001 BTC vout below dust threshold right?
16:54   phantomcircuit   wangchun, iirc the dust threshold is 546 satoshis
16:54   wangchun   not 5460 satoshis? changed?
16:54   aschildbach   wangchun: Yes it was cut by 10 a few months ago.

i don't think it really matters, does it?
since most of the mined blocks are filled with real demand trying to get into blocks with or without spamming,

Unfortunately, the majority in the blocks I checked earlier today have been the DOS attack-- e.g. transactions tracable from outputs of this transaction https://blockchain.info/tx/3bad15167c60de483cd32cb990d1e46f0a0d8ab380e3fc1cace01afc9c1bb5af  and a few others. ... though the attack style has been shifting to evade filtering by miners.

The change mentioned in the chat above is https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3305 (you might find the comments there interesting), it's one of Mikes couple contributions to Bitcoin Core.

[justusranvier]

Don't worry.  According to Mike Hearn Bitcoin can survive just fine with 4 or 6 (forgot which) copies of the blockchain worldwide.

Is he right or wrong about that?

Via what methodology would we test that hypothesis before arriving at a conclusion about its validity?

[Peter R]

Don't worry.  According to Mike Hearn Bitcoin can survive just fine with 4 or 6 (forgot which) copies of the blockchain worldwide.

Is he right or wrong about that?

Via what methodology would we test that hypothesis before arriving at a conclusion about its validity?

1. Does the network still provide strong double-spend protection?

2. Can users freely^* publish valid transactions to the Blockchain (censorship resistance)?

^*That is, subject only to marginal transaction fees.

[tvbcof]

Don't worry.  According to Mike Hearn Bitcoin can survive just fine with 4 or 6 (forgot which) copies of the blockchain worldwide.

Is he right or wrong about that?

Via what methodology would we test that hypothesis before arriving at a conclusion about its validity?

He's 100% right about that.  Bitcoin could probably survive with a single blockchain much like the federal reserve maintains one source of truth.

The statement is enlightening because it demonstrates the stark differences of Bitcoin in our world that different people have.  Like you and I for instance from everything I can see.

If one sees tainting as a good an necessary thing, and understands the communications optimizations which are possible between large and well funded business entities, then a small integer number of existing blockchains makes all the sense in the world.

[Peter R]

The statement is enlightening because it demonstrates the stark differences of Bitcoin in our world that different people have.

Frankly, I think the only thing it demonstrates is your paranoia.  What matters is whether the Bitcoin network functions according to its promises of (1) double-spend protection and (2) censorship resistance.  The architecture of the network doesn't matter so long as those two promises are kept.  

You could argue that with only four to six copies of the Blockchain worldwide, that there is a greater chance that these promises will be broken (and I would tend to agree), but I see that as a different debate.