Re: [bitcoin-dev] Minimum fees

From: Giuseppe B <beppeben2030@gmail•com>
To: WMOURA <neo.m.revolutions@gmail•com>
Cc: Bitcoin Protocol Discussion <bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Minimum fees
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2023 06:19:44 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CABrXkXo+j3e9fRS_3MPWVYk83WRJVnC2bv1OSBaY-Dek5W8y0g@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAJ12oL1UmUJjRhircdxWH7znSCH5bmnqsgabUS74Ns4EU_VLzA@mail.gmail.com>

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This will indeed give some power to the miners. But they have no incentives
in posting super high numbers as that means they won't get paid or they
will with a lot of delay.
This is not simply like setting the price for a product that has a fixed
quality. In the case of the mining services, setting the price also means
setting the quality of the product you offer (as higher price = higher
security). This is simply a way to let miners have have a say about the
quality of the product that they offer. They can always set 0 min fees and
settle for the lowest quality/ low price service, or maybe find out that
offering a better product for a higher price actually makes them more
money.

On Fri, Mar 3, 2023, 3:45 AM WMOURA <neo.m.revolutions@gmail•com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> In my amateur opinion, I imagine that this would give excessive power to the miner, introducing a bug in the system, because if the miner put an absurdly high minimum rate intentionally or not, this would cause a serious problem, or not.
>
>
> Em qua., 1 de mar. de 2023 às 17:25, Giuseppe B via bitcoin-dev <
> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org> escreveu:
>
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> I'm relatively new here so what I'm proposing could have already been
>> discussed, or may be flawed or inapplicable. I apologize for that.
>>
>> I was picturing a situation where block rewards are almost zero, and the
>> base layer is mainly used as a settlement layer for relatively few large
>> transactions, since the majority of smaller ones goes through LN.
>>
>> In such a case it may very well be that even if transaction amounts are
>> very consistent, transaction fees end up being very small since there is
>> enough space for everyone in a block. Users wouldn't mind paying higher
>> fees as they know that that would increase the network security, however
>> nobody wants to be the only one doing that. Miners would of course like
>> being paid more. So everyone involved would prefer higher fees but they
>> just stay low because that's the only rational individual choice.
>>
>> Therefore I was imagining the introduction of a new protocol rule,
>> min_fees, that would work like this:
>> - the miner that gets to mine a block appends a min_fee field to the
>> block, specifying the minimum fees that need to be contained in the
>> following block in order for it to be valid.
>> - one can also mine an empty block and reset the min_fee, to avoid the
>> chain getting stuck.
>>
>> min_fees could either represent the total fees of the following block, or
>> the minimal fee for each single transaction, as a percentage of the value
>> transacted. Both seem to have some merits and some potential drawbacks. Of
>> course min_fees=0 would correspond to the current situation.
>>
>> It looks to me that this could have the potential to bring the
>> equilibrium closer to a socially optimal one (as opposed to individually
>> optimal), and to benefit the network security in the long term. Of course
>> it's just a rough sketch and it would deserve a much deeper analysis. I was
>> just interested in knowing if you think that the principle has some merit
>> or if it's not even worth discussing it for some reason that I'm not
>> considering.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Giuseppe.
>>
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>

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