Quick thought on how to make blockchain-based fee estimates work better in the context of out-of-band mining contracts: have miners advertise in their coinbase's what fees were actually paid, as opposed to appear to have been paid. The logic is very simple: we assume miners aren't an effective cartel and are willing to undercut each other. Therefore it's in their interests for people to broadcast a transaction with a fee that is competitive the first time around so they can get onto mining it immediately. Granted, those incentives may not be as strong as one would like, and there could be some perverse ones as well, but it's a line of thought worth thinking about more. A related idea: let miners advertise a address to submit transactions too. (like a node IP) The inherent proof-of-work is nice and could help people more securely find someone to connect too with the inherent proof that a lot of work went into mining the block with the address in it. Obviously, lots of downsides too, but it's a different security model than other forms of bootstrapping, and that's probably useful in of itself. -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 0000000000000001fce0617deb31cc20bec2903cd10dc352ac3b2fc1af6b27f0