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I am not a developer for bitcoin, but I have been following along in #bitcoin-dev and reading some of the forum threads. (most interesting conversation by far i

by eof 14y ago

I am not a developer for bitcoin, but I have been following along in #bitcoin-dev and reading some of the forum threads. (most interesting conversation by far is on freenode) In pools/miners that are not blocking satoshi dice 70-95% of every block is filled with SD transactions. Further, SD has upped their fees to get higher priority. Interestingly, the sentiment of the devs and the sentiment of the users is vastly different. It seems that the users are overwhelmingly pro SD, anti filtering out SD transactions, and think this is just a nice test for bitcoin and this type of transaction volume is inevitable anyway. (plus, they are of the libertarian leaning in general). Sentiment amongst the devs varies, but it does seem they all agree that SD is abusing the blockchain. There is no reason SD can't remain provably fair and have the same flow without spamming the blockchain; and, since they are reusing addresses and acting in a such a way that their transactions can be trivailly tracked, there is no reason (in some of the devs' minds) to not treat them as spam and filter out their transactions. For their own part, the owners of SD have reportedly taken a "fix your shit" attitude when asked to change their methods. In any case, it has spurred a lot of discussion on "how" to raise the soft limit; which is completely arbitrary, and many pools have already raised it regardless. The real news is that the `hard` limit, which will create a fork is not even an order of magnitude away. No one wants to keep making hard forks, so there is a lot of debate on how to best determine future block limit size on a system wide scale. For my own part, it is hard not to see SD as spamming/abusing the blockchain. If I ran a mining pool or a hasher (I don't) I would block SD as Luke-jr does by not including addresses into blocks that start with `1dice`. It's note worthy that it would be essentially impossible (rather than trivial) to censor SD transactions if they followed best practices. It is also worth noting that there are whispers of SD transaction volume being something of a conspiracy. I have not done any analysis on this; but what I have heard is that the vast majority of SD transactions appear to be bots, playing losing bets 24 hours a day. SD has issued stock, which is publicly traded.

eric_bullington 14y ago
Interesting observation. Actually, I think most of the devs are against filtering SD, too. There is just one very vocal one against it. As far as I can tell, all of the long-time devs oppose any filtering, since SD is working within the limitations of the Bitcoin protocol as it is defined. Please correct me if I'm wrong. But I agree with you that SD could try to find some ways to reduce the quantity of spam. One simple but drastic solution would be to run their own block chain and use it as poker chips that players could easily buy with Bitcoins (once you're in the virtual currency system, exchanging currencies is trivial).
aneth4 14y ago
How can you have a viable worldwide currency subject to "spamming the blockchain"? The nice thing about gold and USD is they have no viable DOS attack vectors. What implications does this have on the future of bitcoin? Is it even possible to have a reliable currency if anyone can create a crippling load on the system?
- eof 14y ago
  Well you determine what counts as spam and just don't propagate it. Fees are a part of the process of keeping spam out of the blockchain. Some people also count sending 'bitdust' as spam.. seemingly defined as anything less than 10k satoshis (or 1/10,000th of a bitcoin--obviously that definition would have to change over time if bitcoin continued to appreciate). The real answer to your question though is 'off chain transactions' will likely become the way a lot of debts are settled. It's trivially easy to double spend coins that have been not confirmed into any blocks, so it's inevitable that this type of fraud will become more prevalent. As such, it makes things like 'buying coffee' with bitcoin really annoying, if I am going to have to wait 2-15 minutes for my transaction to get confirmed into a block it isn't really going to work. So B&M retailers will be forced to make their customers wait for transactions to confirm, or risk getting scammed (which breaks the whole "point" of bitcoin having lower fees than CCs). Enter off-chain transactions. Retailers could either let you hold a balance there, or, more likely.. someone will pop up with a competitive off-chain transaction scheme; perhaps Ripple, perhaps something more like bitinstant; where balances are demoninated in bitcoin and retrievable in bitcoin, but day-to-day small transactions actually happen in a 'centralized' database and are only written to the blockchain upon cashing out. (note this is exactly what is happening with mtgox, where tons of coins exchange hands just within their system that don't get written to the blockchain until you cash out your coins).

by eof 14y ago

eric_bullington 14y ago

Interesting observation. Actually, I think most of the devs are against filtering SD, too. There is just one very vocal one against it. As far as I can tell, all of the long-time devs oppose any filtering, since SD is working within the limitations of the Bitcoin protocol as it is defined. Please correct me if I'm wrong. But I agree with you that SD could try to find some ways to reduce the quantity of spam. One simple but drastic solution would be to run their own block chain and use it as poker chips that players could easily buy with Bitcoins (once you're in the virtual currency system, exchanging currencies is trivial).

aneth4 14y ago

How can you have a viable worldwide currency subject to "spamming the blockchain"? The nice thing about gold and USD is they have no viable DOS attack vectors. What implications does this have on the future of bitcoin? Is it even possible to have a reliable currency if anyone can create a crippling load on the system?

eof 14y ago
Well you determine what counts as spam and just don't propagate it. Fees are a part of the process of keeping spam out of the blockchain. Some people also count sending 'bitdust' as spam.. seemingly defined as anything less than 10k satoshis (or 1/10,000th of a bitcoin--obviously that definition would have to change over time if bitcoin continued to appreciate). The real answer to your question though is 'off chain transactions' will likely become the way a lot of debts are settled. It's trivially easy to double spend coins that have been not confirmed into any blocks, so it's inevitable that this type of fraud will become more prevalent. As such, it makes things like 'buying coffee' with bitcoin really annoying, if I am going to have to wait 2-15 minutes for my transaction to get confirmed into a block it isn't really going to work. So B&M retailers will be forced to make their customers wait for transactions to confirm, or risk getting scammed (which breaks the whole "point" of bitcoin having lower fees than CCs). Enter off-chain transactions. Retailers could either let you hold a balance there, or, more likely.. someone will pop up with a competitive off-chain transaction scheme; perhaps Ripple, perhaps something more like bitinstant; where balances are demoninated in bitcoin and retrievable in bitcoin, but day-to-day small transactions actually happen in a 'centralized' database and are only written to the blockchain upon cashing out. (note this is exactly what is happening with mtgox, where tons of coins exchange hands just within their system that don't get written to the blockchain until you cash out your coins).