Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fee drop

From: Troy Benjegerdes <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 22:50:51 -0600

On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 11:41:16PM -0500, Peter Todd wrote:
> So, just to be clear, we're adding, say, a memory limited mempool or
> something prior to release so this fee drop doesn't open up an obvious
> low-risk DDoS exploit.... right? As we all know, the network bandwidth
> DoS attack mitigation strategy relies on transactions we accept to
> mempools getting mined, and the clearance rate of the new low-fee
> transactions is going to be pretty small; we've already had problems in
> the past with mempool growth in periods of high demand. Equally it
> should be obvious to people how you can create large groups of low-fee
> transactions, and then cheaply double-spend them with higher fee
> transactions to suck up network bandwidth - just like I raised for the
> equally foolish double-spend propagation pull-req.
> 
> Of course, there's also the problem that we're basically lying to people
> about whether or not Bitcoin is a good medium for microtransactions.
> It's not. Saying otherwise by releasing software that has known and
> obvious DoS attack vulnerabilities that didn't exist in the previous
> version is irresponsible on multiple levels.

Well, if your investors take money with market manipulating news stories,
this is absolutely the responsible thing to do to increase shareholder
value with a future opportunity to cause a crash-on-demand.

Besides, if you really want microtransactions, you should be using an
altcoin with faster block times, smaller market cap, and larger 'human'
readable currency supply.

That being said, I'd say include the change, we all know about it. What
would be nice would be some exploits and attack signatures for what the
DOS will look like when it hits so that those of us paying attention
can make some money trading in anticipation of the market crash instead
of just the guys paying for the attack.

The real killer feature of Bitcoin is that we can learn from it's mistakes
(and bitcoin can learn from the copycatcoins), instead of one-size-fits
all fiat.

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Troy Benjegerdes                 'da hozer'                  [email-masked]
7 elements      earth::water::air::fire::mind::spirit::soul        grid.coop

      Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel,
         nor try buy a hacker who makes money by the megahash