Re: [Bitcoin-development] Request review: drop misbehaving peers

2011-09-14 Thread Luke-Jr
On Wednesday, September 14, 2011 9:57:00 PM Gavin Andresen wrote: > I'm looking for review of this pull request: > https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/517 "Non-standard" transactions, or those with "insufficient" fees should not be penalised. These are properly relay/miner policy decisions,

[Bitcoin-development] Request review: drop misbehaving peers

2011-09-14 Thread Gavin Andresen
I'm looking for review of this pull request: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/517 The big idea: if a peer is sending you obviously wrong information, punish it by maybe dropping your connection to it, and ban it's IP address so it cannot immediately re-connect. The probability of droppin

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Difficulty adjustment / time issues

2011-09-14 Thread Luke-Jr
On Wednesday, September 14, 2011 4:09:00 PM Gregory Maxwell wrote: > Though I generally agree with Luke that we should just fix the root > cause even though it forks the chain. I don't support this, unless all other chain-forking-needed changes are made at the same time. I do point out that chang

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Difficulty adjustment / time issues

2011-09-14 Thread theymos
On Wednesday, September 14, 2011 5:51 PM, "Gregory Maxwell" wrote: > General network health and user security _requires_ periodic upgrades > in any case, and will for the foreseeable future. The whole notion > that old versions will _stop working_ would be a pretty good thing at > this point in b

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Difficulty adjustment / time issues

2011-09-14 Thread Gregory Maxwell
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 5:36 PM, Alex Waters wrote: > On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 4:28 PM, Gavin Andresen > wrote: > >> What do other people think?  I think it is too high risk for too >> little benefit and shouldn't be done until we have a really compelling >> reason to introduce a forking change.

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Difficulty adjustment / time issues

2011-09-14 Thread theymos
A better retarget strategy might be to use the real average time between all of the blocks in the interval so that no blocks are treated specially in the calculation. I agree that this is not important enough to fork the chain over, though. An attacker would have to maintain control for a *very* lo

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Difficulty adjustment / time issues

2011-09-14 Thread Alex Waters
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 4:28 PM, Gavin Andresen wrote: > What do other people think?  I think it is too high risk for too > little benefit and shouldn't be done until we have a really compelling > reason to introduce a forking change. Could we bundle this and potential future blockchain-splittin

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Difficulty adjustment / time issues

2011-09-14 Thread Gavin Andresen
> Perhaps better thing to do is to also delay the _forwarding_ of these > blocks _and_ blocks that extend them, until extended one more time. Excellent idea, that gets the incentives right. RE: fixing the root cause with a forking change: What do other people think? I think it is too high risk

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Difficulty adjustment / time issues

2011-09-14 Thread Gregory Maxwell
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 3:52 PM, Aidan Thornton wrote: > Of course, if only a small percentage of mining power adopts this > scheme, everyone that does so will presumably be harming themselves by > doing so since they're essentially increasing the odds that the next > block they mine will become i

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Difficulty adjustment / time issues

2011-09-14 Thread Aidan Thornton
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 3:45 PM, Gavin Andresen wrote: > Modify the getwork code to build on the second-from-tip block if the > first-on-tip block is on the discouraged list. > > Assuming a majority of pools/miners adopt the "discourage blocks with > stale timestamps" rule, that should squash any

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Difficulty adjustment / time issues

2011-09-14 Thread Christian Decker
Am I the only one to think putting pools at a disadvantage is actually desirable? Back when pools started to appear we all had huge reservations about putting so much control into the hands of a few pool operators, but nowadays it seems that having pool operators control a vast majority of the comp

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Difficulty adjustment / time issues

2011-09-14 Thread Luke-Jr
On Wednesday, September 14, 2011 10:45:36 AM Gavin Andresen wrote: > The block timestamp rules currently give HOURS of wiggle-room for > timestamps. We can't change those rules without risking a chain split. And those hours of wiggle-room are not enough to cause a problem. The problem only comes i

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Difficulty adjustment / time issues

2011-09-14 Thread Gavin Andresen
> But that doesn't solve the whole problem, because the block timestamp > checking is based on the assumption that the node is looking at the bitcoin > clock rather than the, ahem, real clock.  If we change the idea of network > time to NTP, we will then need to write (and test!) new block timestam