{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","author_name":"npub17ty4mumkv43w8wtt0xsz2jypck0gvw0j8xrcg6tpea25z2nh7meqf4qgyd","author_url":"https://nostr.ae/npub17ty4mumkv43w8wtt0xsz2jypck0gvw0j8xrcg6tpea25z2nh7meqf4qgyd","provider_name":"njump","provider_url":"https://nostr.ae","html":"📅 Original date posted:2013-04-09\n📝 Original message:OK, as the start of that conversation is now on the list, I might as well\npost the other thoughts we had. Or at least that I had :)\n\nIt's tempting to see this kind of abuse through the lens of fees, because\nwe only have a few hammers and so everything looks like a kind of nail. The\nproblem is the moment you try to define \"abuse\" economically you end up\nexcluding legitimate and beneficial uses as well. Maybe Peters patch for\nuneconomical outputs is different because of how it works. But mostly it's\ntrue. In this case, fees would never work - Peter said the guy who uploaded\nWikileaks paid something like $500 to do it. I guess by now it's more like\n$600-$700. It's hard for regular end users to compete with that kind of\nwild-eyed dedication to \"the cause\".\n\nThe root problem here is people believe the block chain is a data structure\nthat will live forever and be served by everyone for free, in perpetuity,\nand is thus the perfect place for \"uncensorable\" stuff. That's a reasonable\nassumption given how Bitcoin works today. But there's no reason it will be\ntrue in the long run (I know this can be an unpopular viewpoint).\n\nFirstly, legal issues - I think it's very unlikely any sane court would\ncare about illegal stuff in the block chain given you need special tools to\nextract it (mens rea). Besides, I guess most end users will end up on SPV\nclients as they mature. So these users already don't have a copy of the\nentire block chain. I don't worry too much about this.\n\nSecondly, the need to host blocks forever. In future, many (most?) full\nnodes will be pruning, and won't actually store old blocks at all. They'll\njust have the utxo database, some undo blocks and some number of old blocks\nfor serving, probably whatever fits in the amount of disk space the user is\nwilling to allocate. But very old blocks will have been deleted.\n\nThis leads to the question of what incentives people have to not prune. The\nobvious incentive is money - charge for access to older parts of the chain.\nThe fewer people that host it, the more you can charge. In the worst case\nscenario where, you know, only 10 different organizations store a copy of\nthe chain, it might mean that bootstrapping a new node in a trust-less\nmanner is expensive. But I really doubt it'd ever get so few. Serving large\nstatic datasets just isn't that expensive. Also, you don't actually need to\nreplay from the genesis block to bring up a new code, you can copy the UTXO\ndatabase from somewhere else. By comparing the databases of lots of\ndifferent nodes together, the chances of you being in a matrix-like sybil\nworld can be reduced to \"beyond reasonable doubt\". Maybe nodes would charge\nfor copies of their database too, but ideally there are lots of nodes and\nso the charge for that should be so close to zero as makes no odds - you\ncan trivially undercut someone by buying access to the dataset and then\nreselling it for a bit less, so the price should converge on the actual\ncost of providing the service. Which will be very cheap.\n\nThere was one last thought I had, which is that if there's a shorter team\nneed to discourage this kind of thing we can use a network/bandwith related\nhack by changing the protocol. Nodes can serve up blocks encrypted under a\nrandom key. You only get the key when you finish the download. A blacklist\ncan apply to Bloom filtering such that transactions which are known to be\n\"abusive\" require you to fully download the block rather than select the\ntransactions with a filter. This means that people can still access the\ndata in the chain, but the older it gets the slower and more bandwidth\nintensive it becomes. Stuffing Wikileaks into the chain sounds good when a\n20 line Python script can extract it \"instantly\". If someone who wants the\nfiles has to download gigabytes of padding around it first, suddenly\nhosting it on a Tor hidden service becomes more attractive.\n-------------- next part --------------\nAn HTML attachment was scrubbed...\nURL: \u003chttp://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20130409/4f35dfed/attachment.html\u003e"}