Published on: 2015-06-08T22:28:16+00:00
In a recent discussion, Bob McElrath highlighted the technology of Hashcash, originally invented to combat spam, and suggested that individual transactions should be mined rather than relaying unmined items. Peter Todd added to this by describing Bitcoin as a system that maintains a ledger for transferrable hashcash, with transaction fees paid in hashcash.The conversation then shifted to the rising costs of Bitcoin transactions. Patrick Mccorry pointed out that with the current relay fee and Bitcoin exchange rate, the cost of ram per gigabyte amounted to $2.3kUSD. In response, Mike Hearn reduced the minimum relay fee, resulting in a fee of $23 per megabyte and $23k per gigabyte. This escalation in expenses raised concerns about the affordability of Bitcoin transactions.Next, the discussion turned towards potential attacks on Bitcoin. While it was acknowledged that filling all blocks with spam transactions would be costly, it was noted that well-funded entities could potentially harm Bitcoin after the implementation of block size limits. Without these limits, spam transactions would not harm Bitcoin but instead benefit miners at the expense of spammers. However, due to technological constraints and network bandwidth limitations, block size limits are necessary. It was also mentioned that flooding the network with transactions would only increase costs and not compromise security, as it would be more cost-effective to execute a 51% attack.Another issue raised during the conversation was the absence of a memory pool cap in the Bitcoin Core. Raystonn expressed concern about this, but Peter Todd explained that transactions can only be removed from the mempool through mining, double-spending, or node restarting. The suggested solution was to cap the mempool size, although this would impact zeroconf security and hinder the propagation of reasonable fee transactions. Thus, finding a fix for this issue is crucial.The implementation of the block size limit in Bitcoin aimed to prevent the use of massive blocks as an attack, which would delay other miners while they downloaded and validated the large block, benefiting the miner responsible. However, this introduced a new vulnerability: network spamming. Prior to the limit, spamming was economically unfeasible since every transaction required a fee. Now, a spam attack can drive up transaction fees by dropping transactions from mempools, undermining Bitcoin's credibility and usability. To address this, a proposed solution suggests burning a portion of every fee, making it unspendable. Additionally, doubling the default fee per transaction would ensure that miners still receive the same fees. With these changes in place, large blocks would come at a significant cost, even if all transactions within the block were created by the miner. Ultimately, removing the block size limit would be possible once a minimum fee is paid for most transactions in each block and the new transaction fee rule is established.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T13:09:37.959632+00:00