Instead of thinking in terms of blocking uneconomical transactions (how
would a node even determine what's economical?), what about thinking in
terms of paying for a feed of economical (i.e. profitable) transactions?
There is a market for fee bearing, profitable transactions...if there is no
one willing to pay to receive a transaction, then no one will bother
propagating it.  Such a system would make it possible to determine the
probability of confirmation in a given timeframe for a given fee.


On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 3:49 AM, Peter Todd <pete@petertodd.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 09, 2013 at 11:31:55PM -0500, Peter Todd wrote:
> > As discussed endlessly data in the UTXO set is more costly, especially
> > in the long run, than transaction data itself. The fee system is per KB
> > in a block, and thus doesn't properly capture the long-term costs of
> > UTXO creation.
>
> There's been a lot of discussion about this issue, and many people have
> asked that Bitcoin not arbitrarily block interesting potential uses of
> provably unspendable txouts for data applications, and similarly
> spendable txouts representing assets. I've changed my hardline position
> and now think we should support all that stuff. However, there is one
> remaining class of txout not yet talked about, unspendable but not
> provably so txouts. For instance we could make the following a standard
> transaction type:
>
> scriptPubKey: OP_HASH160 <20 byte digest> OP_EQUALVERIFY <data>
> scriptSig: <data>
>
> Of course, usually the 20 byte digest would be picked randomly, but it
> might not be, and thus all validating nodes will always have a copy of
> the data. With the 10KB limit on script sizes you can fit 9974 bytes of
> data per transaction output with very little waste.
>
> A good application is timestamping, with the advantage over
> coinbase/merkle tree systems in that you don't have to wait until your
> timestamp confirms, or even store the timestamp at all. Another
> application, quite possible with large block sizes and hence cheap or
> free transactions, is secure data backups. In particular such a service,
> perhaps called Google Chain Storage, can offer the unique guarantee that
> you can know you're data is secure by simply performing a successful
> Bitcoin transaction.
>
> --
> 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
>
>
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