[timmclean]

>> What protection against non-halting?

The transaction fee is determined based on the number of computational steps in the contract. My understanding is that, if the contract has not halted by the time the transaction fee has been "spent", then the transaction is rejected.

[gatehouse]

yeah I came to the same conclusion, except lines 327/328 confuse me a little bit, as to whether the fee goes to the miner in this case, since on 328 (regular termination) it says so explicitly, but on 327 (exhaustion) it doesn't specify.

[timmclean]

I'm guessing that, if the transaction is rejected, then no fees are awarded -- I could be wrong though.

[gatehouse]

yeah, I'm thinking that if that is the case, it would allow you to create a "spike" contract, a highly funded contract designed to use a lot of miner resources until it inevitably fails. then you could send out transactions to this contract which would cause it to execute and fuck with all the other miners, where you just ignore it because you know it will fail. Maybe the cost for computation makes this unreasonable though, I don't really have a sense of the cost of computation .