Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Fees and the block-finding process

From: BitMinter operator <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2015 16:49:21 +0200

On 12.08.15 11.45, Jorge Timón via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> 1) Potential indirect consequence of rising fees.
> 2) Software problem independent of a concrete block size that needs to
> be solved anyway, often specific to Bitcoin Core (ie other
> implementations, say libbitcoin may not necessarily share these
> problems).

I don't think rising fees is the issue.

Imagine that the government is worried because air lines are selling
tickets cheaply and may run themselves out of business. So their
solution is passing a new law that says only one commercial air plane is
allowed to be in the air at any given time.

This should help a ticket market to develop and prevent air lines from
giving away almost free tickets. In this way the government can protect
the air lines from themselves.

I would not classify all issues that would come out of this as
"potential indirect consequences of rising ticket prices."

It would just make air travel unusable.

That's the problem we may face in the short term.

It would be unwise to go all-in on a solution that doesn't exist yet,
which may or may not arrive in time, and may or may not do the job that
is needed. We need to use the solution we already have so that we can
get by in the short term.

I don't think mining pools will immediately make blocks as big as
possible if the hard limit is raised. Remember that mining pools had to
be coaxed into increasing their block size. Mining pools were making
small blocks to reduce the rate of orphaned blocks. Block propagation is
faster today, but this issue still exists. You need a lot of transaction
fees to make up for the danger of losing 25 BTC. Many pools don't even
pay out transaction fee income to their miners.

-- 
Regards,
Geir H. Hansen, Bitminter mining pool