BITCOIN DEVELOPER TAKING HITS: SHEDDING LIGHT ON THE LUKE-JR CONTROVERSY

For the third time, open source developer, creator of BFGMiner, and founder of the Eligiusmining pool, Luke-Jr, has been publicly attacked for what some view as unilateral patching of Bitcoin core packages in the Gentoo Portage repository.
At issue is the Bitcoin Core developer’s implementation of what he considers ‘improved spam filtering.’ The commonly accepted definition of ‘spam’ in relation to Bitcoin blocks is non-transactional data. Folks who run Bitcoin nodes, be they miners or everyday users, keep a ledger of all transactions that take place.
As part of dealing with the denial-of-service weakness inherent in an open ledger system, work has been done since version 0.3.19 to aid nodes in dealing with non-standard, oversized, double-spend, or otherwise unacceptable entries. The nature of the open protocol is that the entries can always be submitted. Whether or not mining nodes confirm them and place them into finalized blocks, and whether or not other nodes broadcast them, is another issue.
In the case of gambling sites that remit a single satoshi in order to inform the user of a loss, the transaction not only costs more than it is worth to move, but it has long been considered abusive of the collective ledger. Such uses of the network indubitably contribute to the phenomenon known as ‘block chain bloat.’

This post was published at Crypto Coins News on March 12, 2015.

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