7 ms·

Blockchain pollution.

by wyck 5y ago

drcode 5y ago
For those who don't know, Bitcoin Maximalists generally view all non-monetary uses of Bitcoin as a bad thing. This is different from the Ethereans, who believe that most use cases are fine, as long as people pay the requisite transaction fees.
- stevehawk 5y ago
  is there potential for a denial of service attack on the blockchain if people just started inundating it with useless data entries?
  - bombcar 5y ago
    This has basically already occurred IIRC - the entire bitcoin blockchain is now too massive for most people to entirely download and authenticate; most people rely on exchanges, etc to do it for them.
    - spinny 5y ago
      Not really that big yet. i keep a full copy that is a few weeks behind, i'm running the client with the -txindex argument, which indexes all transactions (and takes up a little extra space), currently is at 414 GB. The initial sync from block 0 can take a while, but after having an almost synced copy, getting it up to date is fast I remember thinking "this will never work" after reading the bitcoin whitepaper, i assumed that at some point only supernodes would exist. We might be getting there, be we are not there yet, and definitely moving at a slower pace than my initial prediction. Holding 400-500 GB is still very attainable today at a small cost
      - sashimi-houdini 5y ago
        It only "worked" by not actually being useful as a globally distributed currency for microtransactions (which was the original promise)
  - retrac 5y ago
    Yes, this happened very early on with Bitcoin. Casinos where every wager was a transaction. Then some started actively just spamming. It led to the transaction pricing mechanism. Every transaction includes a bid on how much you'll pay to have it included in the chain. Miners pick the highest bids from recently broadcast transactions. There's no requirement to do so but it's economically incentivized, as the miner receives the transaction fee. Any sustained attack becomes very expensive. And other users can still pay the asking price to get their transaction in the next few blocks. Bitcoin has in practice maxed out the great majority of blocks (about 1 MB per 10 minutes) for a while now, and so many cheap transactions just never get processed as they're always outbid.
  - jcpham2 5y ago
    I did this to namecoin for fun with a bash script for 36 hours in a loop once. This is a true story. Back in the merge mining days they gave them out for free and no one knew what to do with them. I took all the public namecoin addresses I could find and put them in a text file and sent everyone dust. Fun times.
    - pontifier 5y ago
      I spammed several portions of NEM and ground things almost to a halt several times. That coin sucks, and their new one probably isn't much better. I'm sure it's just a way to erase the connection to my spam and cash out a bit while changing the name. What jerks.
  - reidjs 5y ago
    That happened on Ethereum with a game called exit.scam where the last person who buys a token wins, but every time someone buys one the timer resets. In order to win the game a bunch of miners colluded to make it impossible to get a transaction through, guaranteeing they bought the last one.
jude- 5y ago
They all paid the tx fees. Therefore, not pollution.
- kevingadd 5y ago
  Just because you paid a fee to dump your waste doesn't mean it's not waste. Yes, they paid the transaction fee to get put into a block, but now their data sits in the blockchain and eats up storage space on every device that maintains a copy of the chain. For a financial transaction you can at least comfort yourself with the knowledge that the "pollution" is an entry in a finance ledger, but not so here. The transaction fee is set based on how much people are willing to pay right now to get a transaction through, it doesn't factor in the long-term cost to store that transaction on every machine that needs to host it in the future... that cost is ignored.
  - jude- 5y ago
    Miners decide which transactions are "pollution" and which are not. Not you, and not the parent. Seriously, who are you to tell anyone what data is "pollution" and what data isn't? Like, do you go around to people on their laptops in cafes and tell them to delete their files off the Internet because you think they're wastes of space? EDIT: Having a bespoke data field (OP_RETURN) in a Bitcoin transaction is an improvement on this front, because it provides a cheaper alternative to people storing the same data encoded as potentially-spendable UTXOs.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - crazypython 5y ago
    > every device that maintains a copy of the chain. Of the full chain. You can run a Bitcoin full node in pruned mode, only using the most recent 5GB, with more or less the same security. (A 3-day chain reorg would be needed to reduce the security of your full node.) It does make it take longer to set up a pruned node, though.
    - 5y ago

Blockchain pollution.

by wyck 5y ago

Blockchain pollution.

For those who don't know, Bitcoin Maximalists generally view all non-monetary uses of Bitcoin as a bad thing. This is different from the Ethereans, who believe that most use cases are fine, as long as people pay the requisite transaction fees.

stevehawk 5y ago
is there potential for a denial of service attack on the blockchain if people just started inundating it with useless data entries?
- bombcar 5y ago
  This has basically already occurred IIRC - the entire bitcoin blockchain is now too massive for most people to entirely download and authenticate; most people rely on exchanges, etc to do it for them.
  - spinny 5y ago
    Not really that big yet. i keep a full copy that is a few weeks behind, i'm running the client with the -txindex argument, which indexes all transactions (and takes up a little extra space), currently is at 414 GB. The initial sync from block 0 can take a while, but after having an almost synced copy, getting it up to date is fast I remember thinking "this will never work" after reading the bitcoin whitepaper, i assumed that at some point only supernodes would exist. We might be getting there, be we are not there yet, and definitely moving at a slower pace than my initial prediction. Holding 400-500 GB is still very attainable today at a small cost
    - sashimi-houdini 5y ago
      It only "worked" by not actually being useful as a globally distributed currency for microtransactions (which was the original promise)
- retrac 5y ago
  Yes, this happened very early on with Bitcoin. Casinos where every wager was a transaction. Then some started actively just spamming. It led to the transaction pricing mechanism. Every transaction includes a bid on how much you'll pay to have it included in the chain. Miners pick the highest bids from recently broadcast transactions. There's no requirement to do so but it's economically incentivized, as the miner receives the transaction fee. Any sustained attack becomes very expensive. And other users can still pay the asking price to get their transaction in the next few blocks. Bitcoin has in practice maxed out the great majority of blocks (about 1 MB per 10 minutes) for a while now, and so many cheap transactions just never get processed as they're always outbid.
- jcpham2 5y ago
  I did this to namecoin for fun with a bash script for 36 hours in a loop once. This is a true story. Back in the merge mining days they gave them out for free and no one knew what to do with them. I took all the public namecoin addresses I could find and put them in a text file and sent everyone dust. Fun times.
  - pontifier 5y ago
    I spammed several portions of NEM and ground things almost to a halt several times. That coin sucks, and their new one probably isn't much better. I'm sure it's just a way to erase the connection to my spam and cash out a bit while changing the name. What jerks.
- reidjs 5y ago
  That happened on Ethereum with a game called exit.scam where the last person who buys a token wins, but every time someone buys one the timer resets. In order to win the game a bunch of miners colluded to make it impossible to get a transaction through, guaranteeing they bought the last one.

jude- 5y ago

They all paid the tx fees. Therefore, not pollution.

kevingadd 5y ago
Just because you paid a fee to dump your waste doesn't mean it's not waste. Yes, they paid the transaction fee to get put into a block, but now their data sits in the blockchain and eats up storage space on every device that maintains a copy of the chain. For a financial transaction you can at least comfort yourself with the knowledge that the "pollution" is an entry in a finance ledger, but not so here. The transaction fee is set based on how much people are willing to pay right now to get a transaction through, it doesn't factor in the long-term cost to store that transaction on every machine that needs to host it in the future... that cost is ignored.
- jude- 5y ago
  Miners decide which transactions are "pollution" and which are not. Not you, and not the parent. Seriously, who are you to tell anyone what data is "pollution" and what data isn't? Like, do you go around to people on their laptops in cafes and tell them to delete their files off the Internet because you think they're wastes of space? EDIT: Having a bespoke data field (OP_RETURN) in a Bitcoin transaction is an improvement on this front, because it provides a cheaper alternative to people storing the same data encoded as potentially-spendable UTXOs.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- crazypython 5y ago
  > every device that maintains a copy of the chain. Of the full chain. You can run a Bitcoin full node in pruned mode, only using the most recent 5GB, with more or less the same security. (A 3-day chain reorg would be needed to reduce the security of your full node.) It does make it take longer to set up a pruned node, though.
  - 5y ago