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Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2013 17:54:51 +0100
Message-ID: <CANEZrP0gsrd2W3ODfQRSc2k5V7GotJ0vzEAxcAjnaMtDHZ9_JA@mail.gmail.com>
From: Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>
To: =?UTF-8?B?Sm9yZ2UgVGltw7Nu?= <jtimonmv@gmail.com>
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Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Blocking uneconomical UTXO creation
Precedence: list

Why does demurrage even still come up? The base rules of Bitcoin will
not be changing in such a fundamental way.

With regards to trying to minimize the size of the UTXO set, this
again feels like a solution in search of a problem. Even with SD
abusing micropayments as messages, it's only a few hundred megabytes
today. That fits in RAM, let alone disk. If one day people do get
concerned about the working set size, miners can independently set
their own policies for what they confirm, for instance maybe they just
bump the priority of any transaction that has fewer outputs than
inputs. An IsStandard() rule now that tries to ban micropayments will
just risk hurting interesting applications for no real benefit. It's
like trying to anticipate and fix problems we might face in 2020.

There are lots of less invasive changes for improving scalability,
like making transaction validation multi-threaded in every case,
transmitting merkle blocks instead of full blocks, moving blocking
disk IO off the main loop so nodes don't go unresponsive when somebody
downloads the chain from them, and finishing the payment protocol work
so there's less incentive to replicate the SD "transactions as
messages" design.