Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Blocking uneconomical UTXO creation

From: Stephen Pair <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2013 01:31:18 -0400

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 <[email-masked]> 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
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 positioned as A LEADER in The Forrester
> Wave(TM): Endpoint Security, Q1 2013 and "remains a good choice" in the
> endpoint security space. For insight on selecting the right partner to
> tackle endpoint security challenges, access the full report.
> http://p.sf.net/sfu/symantec-dev2dev
> _______________________________________________
> Bitcoin-development mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
>
>

-- 
Stephen Pair, Co-Founder, CTO

Does *your* website accept cash? bitpay.com

ABC6 C11B BF75 9E2B FC6A  B3E0 7B96 40B2 CAC0 C158