Blaming S.DICE is useless. That service alone currently pays more fees to the network than all other Bitcoin usage combined. As S.DICE grows, it will pay more and more fees. More with each and every new user. That is how it's supposed to be of course. The problem here is nothing else than a setting that is slowly but surely becoming a problem for overall Bitcoin usage.

If services such as S.DICE become even more commonplace, obviously we can't just raise the blocksize on their account alone. We can let the fees rise a bit and control it that way. This problem is not about S.DICE though, it's about overall Bitcoin adoption. Without S.DICE it would just take a bit longer, that however would change nothing.

I am so sick of reading MarkM's ridiculous stream-of-conciousness uncypherable posts.  Thank goodness there is an ignore button to the left. 

Speaking of, you made a "dust-spam non-standard" patch right? Where is it?

Sane "colored coin" or "smartcoin" protocols don't depend on some fixed "1 satoshi = 1 share" ratio. Rather for each transaction moving an asset around they calculate what fraction of the asset was assigned to what transaction output, which means you can divide the asset indefinitely without requiring the actual amount of Bitcoins to change. If the asset represented by a txout is worth less than the minimum transaction fee, it's still dust that doesn't make sense to spend.

It's unfortunate that the first smartcoin-type protocols weren't written that way; on the other hand none of them have actually been used in practice. I've written a protocol that does this correctly as apart of my fidelity bonds protocol, see here although I haven't written code to implement it yet.

Excellent! Hopefully we will succeed in convincing the "something must be done" crowd that actually that isn't really the case yet, but nonethess have the discussion anyway so that when it is the case the discussion will be behind us so we'll know exactly what to do.


There would be more money available then for upgrading infrastructure, although I continue to hope that by then exchange rates will be so much higher again than they are now that sheer increase in the buying-power of bitcoins will cause no one who is mining them now and not stupid enough to dump them to have any hesitation* upgrading their infrastructure if they planned to continue mining. Those who just mine to dump are basically "shorting" bitcoins against fiat anyway so if they quit that might be a net good for us rather than any loss at all. (Bulls might be able to pick up their gear even.)


It is well suited to final settlement. Most e-commerce actually wants, maybe even "needs", to delay finality of settlement for quite some time, That might not be a trivial factor in what differentiates final settlement systems from consumer retail sales/purchase systems. Heck from time to time there is even talk of eliminating or deprecating cash even in meatspace, especially for decent-sized transactions. Come to think of it its not just talk lately, isn't cash being outlawed even in some places? It might be appropriate to get more and more pessimistic over time about cash's future - and, already, present - prospects. So I guess I can to an extent feel for you on this one but more so really re cash than re bitcoins, since bitcoins might help get us out from the crunch/attack cash is being subjected to.

* Other than "spend them while they are skyrocketing in value!?!?! Woe is me!"

-MarkM-

I just checked. We're currently at 0.7 transactions per second. If it can scale to 7 transactions per second, well, we still have a long way to go before we even start to have truly crowded blocks.

As important as this issue will eventually be, it's not worth it to get too heated about it at this point. Even when the blocks start getting crowded it's not an immediate issue, fees will simply go up a bit which is not a big deal since the transactions are currently almost free.

I don't see the urgency, so it's more like a snooze button than a wakeup call.

True. I think that a plan must be figured out within the next 6 months if we don't want to rush the hard fork when it's time. And hard fork is such a thing that we don't want to rush it.

It's not that bad though. They can simply put rules in place for the nodes so that the fork only happens when a sufficient number (maybe 90%) has upgraded. Then it's up to the users how fast the hard fork happens. It can happen quickly if the fees become a problem, simply spread the word.

About half maybe

http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/security.html?20124682

The current upgrading tendencies are not really an accurate prediction of how it will be with the fork. The fork, when and if it's decided, is a super high profile thing. It would also likely be something that's already felt by the users (higher fees perhaps?), so they would most likely upgrade significantly faster than with regular patches. That being said, they would likely not upgrade super fast regardless, so months are needed at least.