Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Rebatable fees & incentive-safe fee markets

From: Gregory Maxwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2017 00:47:54 +0000

On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 10:43 AM, Daniele Pinna via bitcoin-dev
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> As an example, mined blocks currently carry ~0.8 btc in fees right now. If I
> were to submit a transaction paying 1 btc in maximal money fees, then the
> miner would be incentivized to include my transaction alone to avoid that
> lower fee paying transactions reduce the amount of fees he can earn from my
> transaction alone. This would mean that I could literally clog the network
> by paying 1btc every ten minutes.

If I'm not mistaken that is is nothing new or interesting: You can
delay some transaction by paying more than it offered by every block
you delay it from. E.g. if the next full block would pay 0.8 BTC in
fees, you just need to make transactions paying more than that. But
you'll pay it for each delay and the people you push out only pay once
(when they are successful), so it gets awfully expensive fast.

(Arguably the monopoly price model is better because outbidding party
doesn't need to bloat the chain to do their thing; arguable its
somewhat worse because its harder to do by accident.)

My thought on this was the same as PT's initial: miners and users can
arrange OOB payments (and/or coinjoin rebates) and bypass this. I
don't see why it wouldn't be in their individual best interest to do
so, and if they do that would likely be a centralizing effect.