Quote from: DeathAndTaxes on March 24, 2012, 06:20:28 PM

Transactions make up the vast majority of the blockchain. This is why downloading blockchain is fast initially (first 50,000 blocks downloads within minutes but then it slows down). Those blocks are mostly empty (yup even Satoshi mined empty blocks).

Quote from: jetmine on March 24, 2012, 06:35:39 PM

The problem with delaying blocks is the following. As a simple user, you may feel personal satisfaction by not relaying the block and it may not affect you in any other way. But as a miner, you are in a difficult situation when you receive a block that you dont "like".

For as long as you plan to dislike it, you cannot mine on top of it - because your potential next block would be waste without the "evil" block. It is chained to it and eventually you will have to publish the "evil" block along with your own next block. To make things worse, your chances of success are higher when you relay the "evil" block as soon as possible. Otherwise you not only depend on your own luck (difficult enough), but also on the luck of the "evil" block (which you have tried to diminish).

D'oh.

Quote from: JoelKatz on March 24, 2012, 06:41:20 PM

If this is the issue, and there's a good chance that it is, there are three possible solutions:

1) Make it more difficult for listening nodes to get what they need to process a block with no transactions.

2) Make it easier for listening nodes to get what they need to process a block with transactions.

3) Raise the transaction fees so that there's enough incentive for botnet operators to get transactions into their blocks.

gmaxwell's solution might provide #1. If D&T is correct, then since gmaxwell's solution requires a miner to use the previous block's tx inputs (rather than just the hash) as verification, this would force mystery to either run more complete versions or bow out. The disadvantages are that it requires a change in protocol, and would increase the size of each block by an unknown amount.

For #2 it's been proposed to replace the blockchain with an acyclic directed graph, but I don't know enough about that to compare it in any way. Apparently this would make tx inclusion cheaper, although I have no idea how that would work, or how the filesize compares to the blockchain.

#3 unfortunately is probably not going to be viable for several years, maybe a decade. When the average number of tx increases by a large amount (maybe to 10k+) then even a small tx fee would generate substantial income, but as of right now, and for at least a few years yet, the block reward is much more significant, and has currency appreciation supporting it.