I must admit I don't get it. If I were a miner, I would take in the most transactions possible that give me the highest income. If Bitcoin can't function in this way it's broken by design.
As long as Satoshi Dice's transactions are following the rules, that's all that matters to me. I don't care what the purpose the transactions are for. Not my business.
SatoshiDice does not follow the rules:The blockchain is a system for transferring value, of which the final total is specified in advance. Those are the terms of the social contract every Bitcoin holder has adopted understanding. Those are the terms every node has agreed to voluntarily participate in the network.
Nodes and miners have
not unanimously agreed to have their resources/time spent
inefficently processing informational messages like "you lose", "you win", or even "I bet on game with much". This was never part of the agreement.
I have not adopted any "social contract". A miner can include whichever transaction he wishes to include. There is no agreement. There is a protocol. The protocol is the agreement,
how you use that protocol is completely up to those who use it. As long as they follow the protocol.
For an easy analogy, this would be like WalMart charging your credit card for every item you pick up off the shelf, and refunding you if you put it back (actually worse, since SD uses 2 transactions for every action).
Not even VISA/MC could handle that kind of abuse, and their system (being centralised) is far more efficient than Bitcoin.
What are you talking about? VISA/Mastercard
would welcome this with open hands! They make a 3% fee for every transaction in their network. If they see a bottleneck they fix it, cause it's making them truckloads of money!
Refusing to accept fee-paying transactions is like a store-owner getting mad at his customers for emptying his shelves. "
What are you doing? You buying all my products leave nothing for all the other people!". The sane approach is to increase prices (fees) if demand is too great.
I included the option of filtering SD transactions out in my initial post because that's a short-term hack that buys additional time [...]
I very much agree with this. Think forward to a situation where 300 "SD"-style services exist, and miners need to maintain 300 different filters to filter out "abusive" transactions. This simply isn't workable.
I really think it is better to rise the transaction size, the idea to filter someone like satoshiDice goes directly against all our freedom philosophy. everyone should be able to use the network like if they where anonymous. Whe just can't use information about satoshi to arbitrary censor it. That's just wrong.
While I agree that filtering out Satoshi Dice transactions seems like a hack, it certainly does not go against any "freedom philosophy". Quite the contrary: not having the freedom to filter out SD transactions would go against our "freedom philosophy". Miners have every right to filter out the transactions they don't want in their block. This is not censorship. No one has a right to get his or her transaction into the block chain. It's a privilege that is increasingly likely to be fulfilled the higher the transaction fee you pay. The trick is to incentivize miners to include transactions by attaching fees to them.