Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 May 2015 12:51:45 -0400

On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 03:32:00PM +0300, Joel Joonatan Kaartinen wrote:
> Matt,
> 
> It seems you missed my suggestion about basing the maximum block size on
> the bitcoin days destroyed in transactions that are included in the block.
> I think it has potential for both scaling as well as keeping up a constant
> fee pressure. If tuned properly, it should both stop spamming and increase
> block size maximum when there are a lot of real transactions waiting for
> inclusion.

The problem with gating block creation on Bitcoin days destroyed is
there's a strong potential of giving big mining pools an huge advantage,
because they can contract with large Bitcoin owners and buy dummy
transactions with large numbers of Bitcoin days destroyed on demand
whenever they need more days-destroyed to create larger blocks.
Similarly, with appropriate SIGHASH flags such contracting can be done
by modifying *existing* transactions on demand.

Ultimately bitcoin days destroyed just becomes a very complex version of
transaction fees, and it's already well known that gating blocksize on
total transaction fees doesn't work.

-- 
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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