Quote from: Andre# on March 12, 2016, 09:25:35 AM

Quote from: AlexGR on March 12, 2016, 01:21:42 AM

Quote from: Andre# on March 11, 2016, 09:46:58 PM

I think it's a good analogy, which makes the issue easier to understand. If there are flaws in the analogy, I'm happy to discuss them. The criticism of AlexGR that people on a bus are real, and Bitcoin transactions in a block (according to him) are not, is just childish.

His other remark that it's cheap to buy all the space in a block (because blocks are quite small and transactions cheap), doesn't discredit the analogy. If someone wants to take out the high speed train from Amsterdam to Paris, he can buy all the train tickets. It's doable, and effectively a DOS attack preventing any other people from using the train. If anything, it shows my analogy is a correct one.

Not there yet.

When you broadcast a tx, where you "pay", say, 1 satoshi per byte, what you are *really* doing is that you are stating your intention that if you get included in some block then you will pay the said amount.

You don't actually pay anything beforehand. The payment is only done upon inclusion. If you get the service, you get paid. If someone else pays more than you, then HE gets it, not you. In that scenario, where he got in and you didn't, the only party paying is him, not you. You haven't paid anything. You only said that you were willing to pay a trivial amount, which was less than him, and the miner said ok, you aren't paying me that much, so I'm going to process that other guy who pays me more.

You are correct, Bitcoin tx are blind auctions. But it also works the other way around. Once you have issued a tx with a decent fee that you expect to be included, someone can come along and flood the (small) block with txs with a bit higher fee. It doesn't even have to be malicious -- a sudden event causing a lot of extra txs will do the trick. Your tx will get "stuck", and you are left behind frustrated. As has been demonstrated recently.

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Blind Self Auctioning System. Maybe that's more accurate now. Cheesy