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Upon further reading, it sounds almost like a supply and demand issue that needs to be solved with an increase in transaction fees, no?
by tocomment 14y ago
Upon further reading, it sounds almost like a supply and demand issue that needs to be solved with an increase in transaction fees, no?
- muyuu 14y agoYes, one of the options is to let the market take care of it. But then you cannot advertise Bitcoin transactions as free any more, as free TXs will likely be lost at a non-negligible rate in the future. Blocking Satoshidice is a temporary fix to give time to the developer community to come up with a better plan. So is increasing the soft limit (we are currently at 1/4 of the hard limit, doubling the soft limit will put as at 50% of it, and it will double the blockchain bloating rate).
- tocomment 14y agoWhat type of solutions could developers come up with? Would most of the solutions involve a "hard fork" that I've been hearing about?
- muyuu 14y agoThere are a few things going on already, and some ideas floating. Another one is the integration of hybrid systems. For instance Ripple + Bitcoin (bulk of small transactions would move out of the block chain, basically things that wouldn't need to be register and/or have extra anonymity requirements). There are a couple ideas on alternative data structures to store the blockchain more efficiently. This would mitigate both bandwidth and storage requirements by potentially an order of magnitude. (Although not so much for miners or general users, but mostly nodes and users of the "standard client" which is still the most used one). So far nothing I've said requires a hard fork. Now, forking (some of these are far from definitive solutions, basically only fee requirement changes are a real solution from the following ones): Enforcement of a minimal but non-0 fee in the very protocol instead of by miner consensus. The way to go IMO. Higher hard limit for the block size (kicking the can, but this can be a very effective kick that would very likely allow for the previous things to happen over time) Equivalently, reduce avg. time per block. "Floating block size" - not a solution proper but a mitigation system to avoid translation volume instability. It would adjust in a similar way difficulty does. I don't know what's going to happen medium or long term, but the best plausible and likely scenario in my opinion is 1) some fee enforcement scheme 2) the bulk of small and local transactions to happen offline - both solving the latency problem and minimising blockchain bloat by orders of magnitude.
- skore 14y agoI think it's fair that "free TXs will likely be lost". That's really just the market at work - If Satoshidice would pay proper fees, I bet those miners would be very happy to lift their block. In a sense making it "worth their effort". Any P2P network dies when leeching of resources completely outweighs sharing of resources. I think Bitcoin with its transaction fees has a very clever mechanism to prevent that from happening.
- asdfaoeu 14y agoSatoshi dice transactions pay relatively high fees and is probably the only reason transactions have any fees at all. Miners already limit the number of free transactions that are processed some (BTC guild) don't even process free transactions. The problem is luke-jr's pool explicitly blocks transactions including satoshi dice addresses. For whatever reason possibly to artificially lower transaction fees to increase adoption. If the miners acted economically this wouldn't be a problem.
- skore 14y agoAh, interesting! I would still be curious whether it's just a matter of price, though. Surely at some point the miners couldn't resist processing the transactions?
- muyuu 14y agoNope, they don't pay relatively high fees for the strain they produce. Although "relatively" is a very loose term I guess.