Quote from: jgarzik on March 21, 2014, 07:22:51 PM

Quote from: PhantomPhreak on March 21, 2014, 07:00:01 PM

Quote from: Luke-Jr on March 21, 2014, 06:42:17 PM

Quote from: LightedLamp on March 21, 2014, 01:18:12 PM

Why do you speak of it as decided that data storage in the Blockchain constitutes abuse?

It's abuse because you're forcing others to download/store your data against their free choice.
Every full node must download the full blockchain (prunable or not!).
Every full node has consented to download and store financial transactions.
NOT every full node has consented to store anything else.
You need 100% consensus for this, not merely some subset (ie, not miners; not developers) or even a majority.

Furthermore, everyone is free to store data that isn't in the blockchain.
There is nothing to be gained by putting it in the blockchain except that you force it on those who don't want it.
Explain how this is anything but abuse...

First of all, Counterparty transactions are financial transactions.

Second, every full node has consented to download and store the Bitcoin blockchain, no less. That is, transactions that accord to the Bitcoin protocol, which Counterparty transactions obviously do. Satoshi imbedded a political message in the Genesis Block, for Christ's sake... You have a much narrower view of the possible use cases for Bitcoin than do others. (See what Peter Todd wrote above.)

CheckMultiSig is quite clearly intended for ECDSA public keys, not arbitrary data. It should be no surprise that using an operation for something other than its intended purpose has negative, perhaps unintended or unknown consequences. Counterparty transactions are not "according to the bitcoin protocol", they slip through because it never expected that the feature be used in that way.

"It works by accident" or "it works because it is difficult to prevent" does not imply good design or the right way of doing things.

Quote

By your reasoning, Bitcoin should never be used for anything new, ever.

No. It is quite easy to extend the bitcoin protocol. It has been done many times. See the BIP process. The community agrees and the protocol is updated.

But that was apparently not the path chosen... counterparty clearly uses a feature (CheckMultiSig) in a fashion for which software was not designed. It is silly to pretend that full nodes "consented" to an unintended use.

Bitcoin does lots of things that it was not originally intended to do. Yes, we'd greatly prefer to use a more elegant solution than what we have now. Counterparty was originally designed to use the OP_RETURN output to store all of its message data, which I feel is very elegant, and leaves a minimal impact on the blockchain. We planned all of our message formats around the 80 byte limit announced by Gavin on the official Bitcoin blog. We only use multi-sig outputs because we have no other choice. We don't want to extend the Bitcoin protocol. We want to do something entirely within it, and as simply and directly as possible, for the benefits to stability, security etc..

Under what circumstances would you consider supporting storing more than 40 bytes of data in the txout space? What do you think of Peter Todd's most recent proposal?