Quote from: crazy_rabbit on March 12, 2013, 02:53:17 PM

Quote from: elux on March 12, 2013, 02:45:17 PM

Quote from: Piper67 on March 12, 2013, 12:16:07 PM

Quote from: flipperfish on March 12, 2013, 12:11:19 PM

I don't think anything is fixed. The current handling of the issue just bought some time. The main problem of too small blocksize remains and will have to be resolved. Now we know it's not possible to even lift the soft limit of 256KB without a hard fork. But this limit would need lifting right now, because transactions are starting to get stuck. So the real hard fork is just about to come up in the next few days. (Either because the old clients need a change to handle the larger blocks, or everyone will be forced to use 0.8+. Well okay, there's the third possibility of a really congested bitcoin-network.)

To quote Mike Hearn:

Quote from: Mike Hearn on March 12, 2013, 10:08:26 AM

Rolling back to the smaller blocks simply puts us out of the frying pan and back into the fire.

Nonsense, of course. Now we know that the transition between versions should be done slightly differently. That is really all we know now.

The blocksize issue is quite trivial to resolve, as long as everyone is on the same page. But don't let me stand in the way of your desire for lower prices Grin

All you know != all that is known. The blocksize issue is not entirely trivial.

We're now back to the old 250KB cap on blocks. There are more transactions than there is room to verify so we either get a congestion of unconfirmed transactions, or an escalation of fees. (In practice, both.)

Importantly, If you don't pay a fee, your transaction won't confirm, and your money is lost until you "double spend" the money with a fee, which is possible in the protocol, but not supported by the clients. Or a "good-samaritan" pool picks it up for free. I have had the displeasure of "losing" a transaction to this problem. It was not fun, and the mistake cost me a good bit of time and money.

Make sure to pay a fee on every transaction going forward.

Quote

Quote from: Mike Hearn on March 12, 2013, 12:51:36 PM

I suppose you forgot already why this thread started - we ran out of block space and transactions started stacking up, unconfirmed. This almost immediately caused lots of user complaints.

Exactly because people did NOT upgrade to Bitcoin 0.8 fast enough, which fixed the bug in 0.7 and below, now we are now back to square one - stuck with blocks that are too small to meet demand for transactions. Expect the complaints to start again soon unless filtering of SD becomes common.

The options I listed in my first post are still the only options. If you don't want to filter out SD transactions then the default "do nothing" option means that transactions will become very expensive, and small quantities of Bitcoin won't be spendable at all.

The fork is certainly a big problem: unfortunately, nobody realized it would happen. It's not even clear yet what kind of testing would have revealed this issue. Simply making big blocks is apparently not enough to trigger it. That said, we knew that BDB was generally a rats nest of weird problems which is one reason why I ported Bitcoin to LevelDB. If the block sizes had been raised a few months from now, we'd probably have just abandoned the 0.7 users to their fate, but we got unlucky with the timing.

Assuming we want Bitcoin to scale up, we'll have to fork 0.7 and lower off the chain sooner rather than later and then raise the block size limits again.

Well, so then people have to pay for transactions I guess.

Not even, everyone just has to agree to switch to 0.8, or, more likely, the upcoming 0.8.1. Once the majority of miners have switched over, the 250k limit will be lifted. But again, let's not get in the way of gold old FUD.