Subject: [Bitcoin-development] Making fee estimation better

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 10:30:43 -0400

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
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