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I do not understand this move. If blockchain size is an issue, I don't understand why the focus isn't pruning the blockchain so that only the hashed headers are

I do not understand this move. If blockchain size is an issue, I don't understand why the focus isn't pruning the blockchain so that only the hashed headers are stored for past transactions. This defeats the point of having 8 decimal places if you can only reasonably use 3+.

nwh 13y ago
It's presumably only temporary measure, and only present in the reference client. Anything below four decimal places is completely worthless at this point anyway; do you really have a use for being able to send 0.01c USD?
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  Maybe I do, yes. A handful of developers shouldn't be deciding acceptable business models for bitcoin. That's not going to lead anywhere good.
  - numbsafari 13y ago
    It's like they did it by fiat or something.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - lwat 13y ago
    If you're making transactions smaller than 1 cent, keep them off the blockchain. You're just wasting everyone's resources. Aggregate them until they're big enough to matter and THEN commit them to the blockchain.
- Avshalom 13y ago
  I can't but people are always talking up bitcoin's ability to be more than just currency, so I assume some of those people probably have a use.
- stormbrew 13y ago
  What if I have need to send $0.10c tomorrow if BTC is then worth $1000? Placing the constraint right on the edge of the current value seems like it will just cause a lot of problems as the value continues to fluctuate.
  - lwat 13y ago
    The limit will be adjusted if BTC becomes worth thousands.
    - stormbrew 13y ago
      Yes, I see that they're adding command line flags. I don't really think BTC can be considered so stable at this point that a run up to $1000 and then a drop back down to the low hundreds within a day or two could be considered impossible. And if its value grows beyond even that the fluctuations may swing even wilder in terms of monetary value. I'd also point out that in much of the world, the local equivalent of $0.01 USD may actually not be a trivially dismissable amount of money. But I'm not sure it's a bad idea, I just think they chose a very awkward value to peg it at.
- trevelyan 13y ago
  Yeah, I do actually.
  - lwat 13y ago
    Why
- ISL 13y ago
  If micropayments are ever to be possible, sub-penny transactions need to happen. If 10^6 people send you $0.001, you get $1k....
  - unreal37 13y ago
    You should be able to send whatever value you want, as long as you pay a fee for the resources used. Why should it take hours for my Bitcoin client to sync (and therefore for me to do anything with my Bitcoins) because people want to encode URLs in the blockchain? In a few years, it could take days to sync a new client. What kind of banking system would that be?
    - Jtsummers 13y ago
      Can't you submit transaction before it syncs as long as you you're confident the transaction will be valid? For a business, they could maintain a current sync and you submit your transmitting address to them and they can verify, that way your smartphone doesn't have to get bogged down with the task of anything other than signing the transaction.
      - unreal37 13y ago
        If I recall, the standard Bitcoin client doesn't work until the blockchain is synced. I've had to wait an hour to do a transaction I wanted to do because I hadn't opened it in a few months.
  - harshreality 13y ago
    $.001 is so low it's not even worth talking about in terms of a globally visible transaction. Your bank won't let you transfer that amount. Why should bitcoin? You don't need to be able to transfer such amounts in order to have sub-1-cent microtransactions. You can have $.000001 cent microtransactions. You simply can't clear them in the global economy without batching them up... which people are used to doing already, because payment clearing services in gov currency have transaction charges that far exceed $.01. Even if payment processing costs weren't an issue (which would cause many more small unbatched transactions in gov currency, similar to the crap being dumped into the block chain... banks have to log gov currency transactions for auditing purposes), whatever the cost of individual transactions, if you have a payor who owes you $.001 over a billing period, you've done something wrong. They'd be just as willing to pay you $.01 as $.001.
lordgilman 13y ago
The UTXO acronym stands for unspent transaction output. Think of it as the total number of Bitcoin bank accounts. Pruning past transactions doesn't shrink this size at all. These UTXOs have to stick around and can never[1] be pruned as they're used in future transactions. And yes, it does seem like 8 decimal places was too much for the current time and they're now correcting for that. [1] If they really wanted to do so with a major fork it's possible but it's not nearly worth the hassle.
- trevelyan 13y ago
  If people are worried about an explosion of ghost accounts with 1 satoshi (80 bytes, right?), just give unspent transaction output to miners if the receiving account has below a certain threshold of funds. Don't tell me I can't send arbitrary payments if I am willing to pay whatever the necessary transaction fee is to process them.
eof 13y ago
not sure pruning the blockchain is really possible. most of the earliest coins are not even spent and many are likely lost; this was something satoshi may not have thought through completely as pruning the blockchain was something he specifically talked about.. but many of the 'deep' coins are still unspent and anything 'above' them is unprunable.
- richcollins 13y ago
  What does above mean in this context? If its later tx involving those addresses then it isn't a problem because there are none?
  - eof 13y ago
    Well the way to prune the blockchain is to store the merklehash only of all spent outputs if you can get a whole tree that has no spendable coins left. So if a bunch of old outputs all had their coins spent you can just prune that part of the tree and forget the blocks themselves and just store the merkleroot that represents the tree; but so many of the oldest coins are still unspent that there won't be a lot of benefit to this (I haven't done the analysis so this is somewhat a hypothesis). You actually have it backwards, it's aproblem precisely because there are not transactions involving those addresses other than the initial block rewards; pruning the tree would make those coins unspendable, which would be unfair. There are so many definitely-lost and likely-lost coins that I imagine at some point there will be a 'move your coins or lose them' mandate that will give people.. idk maybe 2 years or something to move coins to prove they aren't lost, and allow a large chunk of the blockchain to be pruned.

nwh 13y ago

It's presumably only temporary measure, and only present in the reference client. Anything below four decimal places is completely worthless at this point anyway; do you really have a use for being able to send 0.01c USD?

waterlesscloud 13y ago
Maybe I do, yes. A handful of developers shouldn't be deciding acceptable business models for bitcoin. That's not going to lead anywhere good.
- numbsafari 13y ago
  It's like they did it by fiat or something.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- lwat 13y ago
  If you're making transactions smaller than 1 cent, keep them off the blockchain. You're just wasting everyone's resources. Aggregate them until they're big enough to matter and THEN commit them to the blockchain.
Avshalom 13y ago
I can't but people are always talking up bitcoin's ability to be more than just currency, so I assume some of those people probably have a use.
stormbrew 13y ago
What if I have need to send $0.10c tomorrow if BTC is then worth $1000? Placing the constraint right on the edge of the current value seems like it will just cause a lot of problems as the value continues to fluctuate.
- lwat 13y ago
  The limit will be adjusted if BTC becomes worth thousands.
  - stormbrew 13y ago
    Yes, I see that they're adding command line flags. I don't really think BTC can be considered so stable at this point that a run up to $1000 and then a drop back down to the low hundreds within a day or two could be considered impossible. And if its value grows beyond even that the fluctuations may swing even wilder in terms of monetary value. I'd also point out that in much of the world, the local equivalent of $0.01 USD may actually not be a trivially dismissable amount of money. But I'm not sure it's a bad idea, I just think they chose a very awkward value to peg it at.
trevelyan 13y ago
Yeah, I do actually.
- lwat 13y ago
  Why
ISL 13y ago
If micropayments are ever to be possible, sub-penny transactions need to happen. If 10^6 people send you $0.001, you get $1k....
- unreal37 13y ago
  You should be able to send whatever value you want, as long as you pay a fee for the resources used. Why should it take hours for my Bitcoin client to sync (and therefore for me to do anything with my Bitcoins) because people want to encode URLs in the blockchain? In a few years, it could take days to sync a new client. What kind of banking system would that be?
  - Jtsummers 13y ago
    Can't you submit transaction before it syncs as long as you you're confident the transaction will be valid? For a business, they could maintain a current sync and you submit your transmitting address to them and they can verify, that way your smartphone doesn't have to get bogged down with the task of anything other than signing the transaction.
    - unreal37 13y ago
      If I recall, the standard Bitcoin client doesn't work until the blockchain is synced. I've had to wait an hour to do a transaction I wanted to do because I hadn't opened it in a few months.
- harshreality 13y ago
  $.001 is so low it's not even worth talking about in terms of a globally visible transaction. Your bank won't let you transfer that amount. Why should bitcoin? You don't need to be able to transfer such amounts in order to have sub-1-cent microtransactions. You can have $.000001 cent microtransactions. You simply can't clear them in the global economy without batching them up... which people are used to doing already, because payment clearing services in gov currency have transaction charges that far exceed $.01. Even if payment processing costs weren't an issue (which would cause many more small unbatched transactions in gov currency, similar to the crap being dumped into the block chain... banks have to log gov currency transactions for auditing purposes), whatever the cost of individual transactions, if you have a payor who owes you $.001 over a billing period, you've done something wrong. They'd be just as willing to pay you $.01 as $.001.

lordgilman 13y ago

The UTXO acronym stands for unspent transaction output. Think of it as the total number of Bitcoin bank accounts. Pruning past transactions doesn't shrink this size at all. These UTXOs have to stick around and can never[1] be pruned as they're used in future transactions. And yes, it does seem like 8 decimal places was too much for the current time and they're now correcting for that. [1] If they really wanted to do so with a major fork it's possible but it's not nearly worth the hassle.

trevelyan 13y ago
If people are worried about an explosion of ghost accounts with 1 satoshi (80 bytes, right?), just give unspent transaction output to miners if the receiving account has below a certain threshold of funds. Don't tell me I can't send arbitrary payments if I am willing to pay whatever the necessary transaction fee is to process them.

eof 13y ago

not sure pruning the blockchain is really possible. most of the earliest coins are not even spent and many are likely lost; this was something satoshi may not have thought through completely as pruning the blockchain was something he specifically talked about.. but many of the 'deep' coins are still unspent and anything 'above' them is unprunable.

richcollins 13y ago
What does above mean in this context? If its later tx involving those addresses then it isn't a problem because there are none?
- eof 13y ago
  Well the way to prune the blockchain is to store the merklehash only of all spent outputs if you can get a whole tree that has no spendable coins left. So if a bunch of old outputs all had their coins spent you can just prune that part of the tree and forget the blocks themselves and just store the merkleroot that represents the tree; but so many of the oldest coins are still unspent that there won't be a lot of benefit to this (I haven't done the analysis so this is somewhat a hypothesis). You actually have it backwards, it's aproblem precisely because there are not transactions involving those addresses other than the initial block rewards; pruning the tree would make those coins unspendable, which would be unfair. There are so many definitely-lost and likely-lost coins that I imagine at some point there will be a 'move your coins or lose them' mandate that will give people.. idk maybe 2 years or something to move coins to prove they aren't lost, and allow a large chunk of the blockchain to be pruned.