Bitcoin supports transaction fees paid to the node that records a transaction into the block chain. If too many nodes start dropping transactions, you can pay a fee when you want to increase the likeliness of your transaction being recorded in the next block.

That's a clever (and very free-market) solution. How does BitCoin currently deal with transactions that aren't published in a block for a long time? Is there any risk of them being lost?

The premise is false.  Adding more transactions to the block you're working on does NOT slow down your generation rate.  When generate is scanning hashes, it only hashes the header of the block, which is constant size.  The header contains a hash of the transactions (the Merkle root) and is only updated occasionally.

If necessary I can write code to make nodes prefer not to use a block if it doesn't contain enough of the transactions they know about.  A discouraged block would almost always fail to be included in the main chain, but would be accepted if it did get in.  I doubt this will be necessary, since there's no real advantage for nodes not to include all transactions.

It doesn't matter if a transaction's not included; it'll get included in a later block. As long as the attackers have much less CPU power than the rest of the network, they won't be a problem.

You, sir, are a powerful necromancer.

Can you raise Satoshi from the dead too?

I was led here via https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses (search for "Satoshi has communicated that he will write code to stop this kind of thing if it becomes a problem" text). So I'm not a necrophiliac.

Most miners will choose option 2 coz of greed.

The existence of an incentive does not presuppose all will follow that.

Thankfully, most do, otherwise value would collapse.

Heh. It's the 1st time I see a person who can write but can't read.


Should I rewrite it MORE slowly?