Thankyou.
1)
The article in the Register gave the insertion cost for 20kB as $380, but that's based on an interview, so it's unverifiable. I've found other cost estimates, but most low cost, high security insertion methods seem to rely on input script manipulation or fake transactions. Your snip gives little clue as to which insertion method is being used, but methods using multiple output scripts have limited capacity, which caps the overall data to somewhere around 1500B per output script, about half what's implied by your snip. So I'm puzzled. Without knowing the method it's hard to be sure that the following applies
S2.1 sorry about the formatting
Which implies one needs to understand the probability of that insertion being permanently stored on the blockchain.
2)
As
I said, the blockchain can
only be permanently altered by mining, ie storing verification of transactions during the creation of new blocks. Each transaction currently costs 834kWh but I can't find anything discussing the marginal electrical cost of data insertion (or the data overheads involved). An entirely fake transaction (which I think you were implying in #4058) takes that much power at low cost to the injector. A series of fake or low-value-but-unnecessary real transactions used as carriers for data will cause absurd overall network costs, again for low injection costs (well, $30 for 20k is only 'low' in this circumstance, it's nonsensically high in every other context).
As with the rest of Bitcoin, this breaches the principle of 'Polluter Pays'.
Just for context, when we started discussing power consumption on this thread,
back in November, each transaction took 236kWh. Now it's 834. Overall daily power consumption has more than doubled in that time.
1)
Cool. 2.1 of that document is a great summary of what the options are.
Transaction fees fluctuate a lot. Chances are that it was that much a couple of months ago.
Adding 21kB as a "standard transaction" would be a single transaction from one address to loads of destination addresses. e.g - one address paying out to a few thousand addresses.
If you pay fees as I mentioned above you'd get this on the blockchain in two hours - no problem.
(you don't use real destination addresses though - you use the data you want to publish)
Adding 21kB as a "non-standard transaction" is an attempt to save cost by being a bit hacky, and hoping no one checks what you are doing.
When a miner solves a block and adds it to the chain, they receive a reward of some bitcoin. They also have the option of adding in peoples transactions to the block and keeping the fees they paid.
They don't have to add any transactions, if they don't want. But obviously they do for the fees and to keep the system running.
The miners should have a system in place that picks the biggest fee payers first, which are also the smallest in size.
This "non-standard transaction" technique is hoping that miners aren't very thorough with the above, and publish their transaction and extra data. But if they are validating that the transactions are sensible, then the miner will just ignore the gibberish transaction.
2)
yeah - the system is fucked. The power consumption increases to meet/combat the excessive number of miners. Its gone a bit crackers.
It's not sustainable at all. I'm interested to see if it finds a level that works.
Side question - You say "transaction currently costs 834kWh" - As far as I know that might well be right. But are you sure its per transaction and not per block?
I'm not implying a fake transaction. None of them are fake as far as I am aware. I am saying that either the transaction payment is legitimate but destination address is not a real address (in which case the transaction is still added to the block and the money waits in limbo for someone with the correct key to pick it up). Or people make a legitimate transaction and cram some stuff in the blank space that they've stretched out on the transaction.
Either way the power consumption is not much different from a normal transaction. The price doesn't effect the power. Similarly - price doesn't affect fees.
