"State of the Coin 2012" and the mention of Satoshi Dice

4

Jeff Garzik in his presentation "State of the Coin 2012" put the following slide:

Bitcoin development

Like trying to fix and upgrade a car,
While the car is going 100 m.p.h.,
With users fighting over the driver's seat,
Including one big burly driver named SatoshiDice,
All of whom do not really listen to the mechanic,
Who will lose all their money if the car crashes.
And this is what we call fun!

What did he mean by that reference to SatoshiDice? I wouldn't want to not get any possible jokes, hints or allegations ;).

ThePiachu

Posted 2012-09-18T16:39:23.047

Reputation: 41 594

Answers

7

There was a very controversial and heated discussion among developers and on forum started by Matt Corallo: Huge increase in satoshidice spam over the past day. Essentially he proposed to police transactions priority for block inclusion to punish websites which doesn't take measures against overburdening Bitcoin Network.

It's worth to note that SatoshiDice by no means was trying to DDOS Bitcoin Network. The amount of transactions is the result of its successful business model and somewhat careless implementation.

Personally I think SatoshiDice is a very good thing, it pushed Bitcoin Network to its limits, but not to the point where it could become dysfunctional. SatoshiDice revealed that network's choke point was disk access time to verify transactions rather then ECDSA verification time. As far as I know LevelDB implementation to store transactions history to reduce disk access time was the direct result of SatoshiDice spam. It is also accelerated development of Ultra Prune method to reduce storage requirements.

Serith

Posted 2012-09-18T16:39:23.047

Reputation: 5 220

4If I can comment as the one who is working on "ultraprune": these are developments that would have happened anyway, though potentially only later. The sudden increase of transactions on the network (and lack of corresponding economic activity) means we had to shift priorities, and are potentially losing users or at least losing full nodes on the network due to the unexpected burden. It is not necessarily a problem, but a less sudden growth might have made things a lot smoother for everyone. – Pieter Wuille – 2012-09-18T22:53:21.550

Asked: 2012-09-18T16:39:23.047

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Active: 2013-10-28T18:53:20.760