Quote from: Holliday on March 24, 2012, 05:47:26 PM

Quote from: Haplo on March 24, 2012, 05:35:58 PM

3: The blockchain is 2 fucking gigabytes, and climbing at an absurd rate. If I have to download a 2GB blockchain, and 15% (or more) of all the blocks are empty or nearly empty, then why have I wasted my time downloading 300MB+ of that? The only purpose of the blockchain is to be able to securely verify transactions that have occurred, and empty or nearly empty blocks add filesize without contributing to the purpose of the data. At the rate things are going it's already going to take further development just to figure out how to keep the size reasonable, and the last thing we need is a bunch of retards being paid in inflation to spam it up faster.

Have you looked at the size of an empty block? If 15% of the current blocks are empty, they will account for about 5.50 megabytes.

Edit: If the entire block chain was empty blocks, it would be about 36.7 megabytes. Do you really think empty blocks being considered spam is a reasonable argument?

Quote from: jetmine on March 24, 2012, 05:46:09 PM

Quote from: DeathAndTaxes on March 24, 2012, 04:16:55 PM

In a dumb miner - pool model the fact that the miner doesn't do the workload doesn't mean the workload doesn't exist.

One getwork is ~400 bytes. Some have speculated mystery has 1.8 million nodes. To use a traditional full pool server the bandwidth requirements alone would be 5.7Gb and 1.8 million connects every long poll.

The getwork size is the same, whether transactions are included or not. The quantity of getworks is the same too, whether or not transactions are included.

If your calculations prove anything, then that its not a botnet. "Because its too difficult to manage even a moderade sized botnet (ask Tycho)" - your own words paraphrased.

The fact that transactions are not included does not add one single jota of support towards/against the botnet theory.

*sigh*, well if that's true then either someone is charging a ridiculous fee, or there's a bug in some version of the miner software. If the difference in load and everything else between including tx and not including tx is basically insignificant, then there should be no reason for anyone to be purposefully excluding them.

On the other hand, if an empty block is really ~1/55th the size of a block with lots of tx, then it might really be someone trying to cheap out on bandwidth while still getting paid.

Either way, it ought to be stopped.