In the low-subsidy future fees will be the main source of income for miners. Thus in some circumstances large miners may even have a reason to delibrately try to mine a block that would orphan the current best block. A simple example would be what would happen if a 1000BTC fee tx was created, but more realistic examples would be just due to a large number of tx's with decent fees. However, with limited block-sizes such a strategy runs into a problem at a point: you can't fit more tx's into your block so you can't increase the fees collected by it even if you wanted too. Best strategy will soon be to accept it and move on. The second thing that could help defeat that strategy is if clients use nLockTime by default. Clients should always create their transactions with nLockTime set such that only the next block can include the transaction, or if the transaction isn't time sensitive, possibly even farther in the future. Remember that to get ahead, you need to mine two blocks, and with nLockTime the first block could only gain the transactions in the block it orphans, so any further transactions could only go in the second. With limited blocksizes that creates even more pressure in that the block becomes full. I don't see any reason why nLockTime in this fashion would harm clients, so I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do and provides some nice benefits down the road. -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org