Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: Steemit how can this thing be workable long term?
by
AlexGR
on 20/07/2016, 03:32:08 UTC
Potential issues that I came across today

1) Someone pointed out the fact that steemit has no fees. My question was, ok, then how does it prevent spam?

Quote
https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemship/the-missing-link-has-steemit-revolutionized-micropayments-or-made-them-obsolete#@alexgr/re-steemship-the-missing-link-has-steemit-revolutionized-micropayments-or-made-them-obsolete-20160719t214207846z

"1.) Problem: Fees. Solution: Steem has no transaction fee."

Question: Isn't that an attack vector where someone can just bloat the blockchain - in the order of terabytes? How is that avoided here?


I covered that upthread. They rate limit the transactions, which has some negative implications for certain potential applications. And there is a transaction fee, which is the cost of holding Steem while it is debased 9X more than SP (since SP can't be transacted).

A rate limit can only be effective along with size limitations. Otherwise if you have, say, a rate limit of 1 post per second per account, but no size limitations, then

-with one account
-you can make 86400 txs per day
-let's assume 20kb size

=1.7gb spam. If the txs are ike 100kb, that's 8.6gb per day.

At a more restrictive 2 sec between txs / 2kb per tx, you have 43200 txs per day x 2kb = 86mb. For a single account. If someone buys 100 such accounts, it's 8.6gb per day.

I'm really curious on how no fees can work.

Blockchains are good, but not really efficient in dealing with spam.