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Jeff Garzik | 15 Jun 2012 19:17

SatoshiDice and Near-term scalability

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Stefan Thomas <moon <at> 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 :)

--

-- 
Jeff Garzik
exMULTI, Inc.
jgarzik <at> exmulti.com

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Stefan Thomas | 15 Jun 2012 19:52
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Re: SatoshiDice and Near-term scalability

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.

> 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:
> On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Stefan Thomas <moon <at> 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...
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Jonathan Warren | 16 Jun 2012 04:35

Re: 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 <at> exmulti.com] 
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2012 1:17 PM
To: bitcoin-development <at> 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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Amir Taaki | 16 Jun 2012 06:33
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Re: SatoshiDice and Near-term scalability

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 <at> bitcoinstats.org>
To: bitcoin-development <at> 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 <at> exmulti.com] 
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2012 1:17 PM
To: bitcoin-development <at> 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.
(Continue reading)

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Mike Hearn | 16 Jun 2012 10:30
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Re: SatoshiDice and Near-term scalability

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 <at> yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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 <at> bitcoinstats.org>
> To: bitcoin-development <at> 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-----
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