Quote from: maaku on March 28, 2014, 08:54:02 PM

Let me start with the good. There is a reason we (developer hat on) are generally up in arms about "abusive" data-on-blockchain proposals: it is because we see the potential of this tech! We know that issued assets and smart property contracts could grow to eclipse bitcoin traffic entirely. Some of us are even convinced this could happen quickly.

Why is this bad? Because despite bitcoin being in the process of going mainstream and getting all sorts of attention from everybody, everywhere, the number of full nodes is declining. As mentioned by others this is in large part due to the rise of SatoshiDice. Now I don't object to gambling services on bitcoin, nor do I know any other developers who do. What you do with your money is your business. The issue is that SD gave a trivial amount of satoshi's back to indicate a lost bet, which effectively was an uneconomical-to-spend data message similar in size to a class A Mastercoin transaction which Counterparty is sadly now adopting. That drain on the resources of the network from this extra data processing is causing people to turn off their full nodes and switch to SPV clients.

I don't want to cause undue fear and panic as with time and effort and education and innovation this situation is correctable. But if left to run its course this trend would mean the death of bitcoin. And parasitic[1] systems like mastercoin and counterparty make the situation worse. It's like adding bad weather, stormy seas, and sharks while we're treading water trying to find a solution.

Furthermore, it's simply not necessary. You can accomplish all of Counterparty's goals via off-chain solutions the same or similar security guarantees. There has been a lot of mis-information out there about this! That's why I pointed to the Freimarkets paper I co-authored with jtimon. It's not because I want to claim credit for the idea (it is as old as bitcoin), but to show there are worked out counter-proposals that could be implemented today.

We tried to make very clear from the beginning that OP_RETURN was never meant to be used. Enabling small data commitments is like cooperating with a mugger: losing your pride is preferable to losing your life. Likewise, if you insist on abusing the block chain than please at least don't do something so recklessly stupid and hurtful as a class A mastercoin transaction. Put a hash of the data in the block chain instead. OP_RETURN was only ever meant to contain a hash - 32 bytes.

But ultimately what you *should* be doing is running your own network and have a low-volume mechanism for transferring coins between the two. That helps bitcoin scale and gives you added capabilities like SPV support, pre-signed offers, and scripting extensions.

Our objection from the start has not been "we don't want to see this" but rather "we don't want to see it done in this particular way" because it externalizes costs and makes the situation worse than it already is.

[1] "Parasitic" has a well defined technical meaning and is not meant as a derogatory term here.

@suppow: Hi, it was good to meet you at CoinSummit!

The threats/blacklists/net neutrality discussions aside.

I'm not really sure what viewpoint really stands among core Bitcoin developers as to scalability problems. Peter thinks there is a problem, Gavin thinks it's not a problem - what kind of contribution to data load on the blockchain would constitute 'abuse'? - is there any real danger? At which scale?

What's wrong with charging a fee for each 40 bytes of OP_Return as has been proposed ?- everyone doing transactions that require additional data could switch to that implementation and contribute to network maintenance with fees. If issued assets and smart property indeed blow up to take up a significant fraction of the Network traffic - and a side-chain implementation happens to run shorter block times with 66% less fees - of course people will switch! I just don't understand what advantage there is to be had from a pseudo-factual speculative debate about the effect of this or that as it can or maybe won't happen, when free market forces can be allowed to do the work.