SatoshiDice and Near-term scalability

5 messages, 15 to 16 Jun 2012. Started by Jeff Garzik.

Jeff Garzik, Stefan Thomas, Jonathan Warren, Amir Taaki, Mike Hearn

Jeff Garzik 15 Jun 2012, 17:17 UTC permalink original

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Stefan Thomas <moon@justmoon•de> wrote:

Quoted text (1 line)

> The artificial limits like the block size limit are essentially putting

[...]

Changing the block size is an item for the hard-fork list. The chance of the block size limit changing in the short term seems rather low... it is a "nuclear option."

Hard-fork requires a very high level of community buy-in, because it shuts out older clients who will simply refuse to consider >1MB blocks valid.

Anything approaching that level of change would need some good, hard data indicating that SatoshiDice was shutting out the majority of other traffic. Does anyone measure mainnet "normal tx" confirmation times on a regular basis? Any other hard data?

Clearly SatoshiDice is a heavy user of the network, but there is a vast difference between a good stress test and a network flood that is shutting out non-SD users.

Can someone please help quantify the situation? kthanks :)

Stefan Thomas 15 Jun 2012, 17:52 UTC in reply to Jeff Garzik permalink original

I do agree that changing/lifting the block size limit is a hard fork measure, but Mike raised the point and I do believe that whatever we decide to do now will be informed by our long term plan as well. So I think it is relevant to the discussion.

Quoted text (1 line)

> Can someone please help quantify the situation?  kthanks :)

According to BlockChain.info we seem to have lots of small blocks of 0-50KB and some larger 200-300 KB blocks. So in terms of near term measure one thing I would like to know is why miners (i.e. no miners at all) are fully exhausting the available block size despite thousands of transactions in the memory pool. I'm not too familiar with the default inclusion rules, so that would certainly be interesting to understand. There are probably some low hanging fruit here.

The fact that SatoshiDice is able to afford to pay 0.0005 BTC fees and fill up the memory pool means that either users who care about speedy confirmation have to pay higher fees, the average actual block size has to go up or prioritization has to get smarter. If load increases more then we need more of any of these three tendencies as well. (Note that the last one is only a very limited fix, because as the high priority transactions get confirmed faster, the low priority ones take even longer.)

On 6/15/2012 7:17 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote:

Quoted text (23 lines)

> On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Stefan Thomas <moon@justmoon•de> wrote:
>> The artificial limits like the block size limit are essentially putting
> [...]
>
> Changing the block size is an item for the hard-fork list.  The chance
> of the block size limit changing in the short term seems rather low...
>  it is a "nuclear option."
>
> Hard-fork requires a very high level of community buy-in, because it
> shuts out older clients who will simply refuse to consider >1MB blocks
> valid.
>
> Anything approaching that level of change would need some good, hard
> data indicating that SatoshiDice was shutting out the majority of
> other traffic.  Does anyone measure mainnet "normal tx" confirmation
> times on a regular basis?  Any other hard data?
>
> Clearly SatoshiDice is a heavy user of the network, but there is a
> vast difference between a good stress test and a network flood that is
> shutting out non-SD users.
>
> Can someone please help quantify the situation?  kthanks :)
>

Jonathan Warren 16 Jun 2012, 02:35 UTC in reply to Jeff Garzik permalink original

Yes, I measure mainnet confirmation times on a regular basis. http://bitcoinstats.org/post/tx-confirmation-times-June2012.png

Before fairly recently, fee-paying transactions never took anywhere close to this long to be confirmed.

Jonathan Warren (Bitcointalk: Atheros)

-----Original Message----- From: Jeff Garzik [mailto:jgarzik@exmulti.com] Sent: Friday, June 15, 2012 1:17 PM To: bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge•net Subject: [Bitcoin-development] SatoshiDice and Near-term scalability

Hard-fork requires a very high level of community buy-in, because it shuts out older clients who will simply refuse to consider >1MB blocks valid.

Amir Taaki 16 Jun 2012, 04:33 UTC in reply to Jonathan Warren permalink original

Did anyone try sending them an email asking them to stop or offering help to fix their site? What did they say? I'm sure they would try to be accomodating.

----- Original Message ----- From: Jonathan Warren <jonathan@bitcoinstats•org> To: bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge•net Cc: Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2012 4:35 AM Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] SatoshiDice and Near-term scalability

Yes, I measure mainnet confirmation times on a regular basis. http://bitcoinstats.org/post/tx-confirmation-times-June2012.png

Before fairly recently, fee-paying transactions never took anywhere close to this long to be confirmed.

Jonathan Warren (Bitcointalk: Atheros)

Hard-fork requires a very high level of community buy-in, because it shuts out older clients who will simply refuse to consider >1MB blocks valid.

Mike Hearn 16 Jun 2012, 08:30 UTC in reply to Amir Taaki permalink original

Joseph is quite accommodating and doesn't want to hurt the network. That said "asking him to stop" seems like the worst possible solution possible. His site is quite reasonable.

I think if I fix bitcoinj to have smarter fee code he might stop attaching a small fee to every TX, but I'm not sure.

On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 at 6:33 AM, Amir Taaki <zgenjix@yahoo•com> wrote:

Quoted text (58 lines)

> Did anyone try sending them an email asking them to stop or offering help to fix their site? What did they say? I'm sure they would try to be accomodating.
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Jonathan Warren <jonathan@bitcoinstats•org>
> To: bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge•net
> Cc:
> Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2012 4:35 AM
> Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] SatoshiDice and Near-term scalability
>
> Yes, I measure mainnet confirmation times on a regular basis.
> http://bitcoinstats.org/post/tx-confirmation-times-June2012.png
>
> Before fairly recently, fee-paying transactions never took anywhere close to
> this long to be confirmed.
>
> Jonathan Warren
> (Bitcointalk: Atheros)
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeff Garzik [mailto:jgarzik@exmulti.com]
> Sent: Friday, June 15, 2012 1:17 PM
> To: bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge•net
> Subject: [Bitcoin-development] SatoshiDice and Near-term scalability
>
> Hard-fork requires a very high level of community buy-in, because it shuts
> out older clients who will simply refuse to consider >1MB blocks valid.
>
> Anything approaching that level of change would need some good, hard data
> indicating that SatoshiDice was shutting out the majority of other traffic.
> Does anyone measure mainnet "normal tx" confirmation times on a regular
> basis?  Any other hard data?
>
>
>
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