Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: SegWit + Variable and Adaptive (but highly conservative) Blocksize Proposal
by
DooMAD
on 14/05/2017, 11:09:56 UTC
How do you differentiate real demand from spam demand?

If someone like Ver decides to dump millions of dollars worth of spam transactions in order to make the blockchain huge, how do you stop this? since if it's automated, the blockchain will just adapt to this demand (even if its fake) centralizing the nodes as a result.

I just don't see how flexible blocksize schemes aren't exploitable.

Define Spam first.

 Grin

I think that's another one of those things that everyone finds difficult to agree on.  The safest definition for me would be deliberate and repeated transactions with no intention to transfer any value, but it's not always easy to recognise such transactions if the culprit is determined to cover their tracks.  Some attackers are more blatant than others.  But equally it's easy to lose context and assume that all small value transactions or transactions with low fees are spam, but this isn't a safe assumption due to users in less economically wealthy parts of the world getting involved.  All we can really do is minimise the motivation to engage in deliberate spamming by making it expensive or difficult (or both) to do.

Was Litecoin's spam fix ever implemented in Bitcoin?  And if not, could we look at implementing that as part of this proposal?