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Re: Upcoming Bitcoin Hard Fork & /r/bitcoin censorship

Yeah I can't really say it much better than @cryptonaut just did, tip'd!

Re: Upcoming Bitcoin Hard Fork & /r/bitcoin censorship

@ademczuk The push for XT backed by 'the sky is falling mantra' by an entity that desires white/blacklisting sounds an awful lot like a coup to encode KYC requirements into future transactions.

Personally I'm just glad that at the scaling Bitcoin workshop the developers can

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Hash it out and pick a solution to this miner problem

Part of the issue is that the sky sorta is falling, today for example is the start of a 30 day stress test publicity stunt by a wallet maker who wants to shunt people to their wallet because all other wallets that don't automatically raise miner fees in congested networks (which is pretty much just something they're doing right now) will have transactions getting stranded because of their spam attack.

So they've created a wallet whose distinguishing feature is that in adverse conditions it knows how to pay enough to not get stranded, and to market it they are causing the problem themselves for a full month.

At 1mb blocks it is not overly expensive to do this, at 8mb blocks it's 8x as difficult

I'm not taking a position here, just pointing out that 1mb block size is already having negative repercussions on the network - We've already seen transactions getting stuck for hours and the backlog isn't even past 30,000tx yet - I expect a pretty major disruption to reliable service from this and it's costing them less than 100btc to pull it off.

Re: Upcoming Bitcoin Hard Fork & /r/bitcoin censorship

Right, I've been thinking about the "no block increase" argument that doesn't sacrifice p2p and what you wind up with is lots of purpose specific chains interoperating with bitcoin as a "money" layer. Depending on what you think about merged mining, it looks a whole lot like side-chains or a layer that connects bitcoin and altcoins.

Re: Upcoming Bitcoin Hard Fork & /r/bitcoin censorship

@sangye

Spamming does not cost money when you only broadcast the tx's that you're spamming after you've already found the block that will contain them, then you're paying all the cost (miners fee) to yourself and if you don't find the block you dont broadcast the tx's

Thats the core issue. Dynamic limits are just going to be gamed because its inexpensive and advantageous to those doing it.

I had to think about that for some time - so you are saying mining pools might pad out blocks (freely because those are only included when they solve a block) with transactions just to grow the block size. If there was an upside to manipulating that there is no economic barrier or cost and if they have 10% of the total network hash rate they can fill a significant amount of blocks with spammed transactions. Perhaps to excluded smaller operators with slower internet connection speed from mining effectively?

Yeah basically, you make it so whenever you find a block that you've stuffed, you have a greater head start (and thus improved chance) of finding the next block, which you can also stuff. If there is an advantage to doing this, then there is actually an economic cost to not doing it (you don't give yourself the head start when you find a block) thus dynamic limits have a problem that seems intractable in our current equilibrium

Re: Upcoming Bitcoin Hard Fork & /r/bitcoin censorship

@sangye

We could have a dynamic block size based on the average transaction volume over the last say 10,000 blocks, but then it is both unpredictable and could potentially be gamed by producing a lot of spam transactions over a period of time.

The thing about dynamic block size - sure, it could be influenced ... but spamming costs money. Then when it hasn't got that spamming going on ... it will decrease in size dynamically too. So - like many attacks on bitcoin you see that things aren't really economically beneficial to manipulate. It needs a lot more consideration before it is discounted. So i am starting to like the idea about voting for block size increases or dynamic increases. So i would like to hear it get treatment like that epic deathandtaxes article https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=946236.0 that @adam recently did a piece on. That deepened my understanding and shows the value of not assuming anyone is right if they even make a basic statistic like "7 transactions per second is the current limit" which was shown to be completely false.

Clearly though the transaction price should also dynamically be adjusted to make it financially challenging to spam the blockchain.

When the 1mb limit was put in place it was much less expensive to spam the blockchain than it is now. I don't know what wallets were charging in 2011 for bitcoin transactions but the $US value was considerably lower.

Spamming does not cost money when you only broadcast the tx's that you're spamming after you've already found the block that will contain them, then you're paying all the cost (miners fee) to yourself and if you don't find the block you dont broadcast the tx's

Thats the core issue. Dynamic limits are just going to be gamed because its inexpensive and advantageous to those doing it.