If the miner wants to force fees up, why would he fill up a block with
placeholder high fee transactions, instead of simply cutting off
transactions paying less fee than he is willing to take? Is there any
evidence someone is doing such a thing for whatever reason?

2018-01-27 6:45 GMT-02:00 Nathan Parker via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>:

> Miners can fill their blocks with transactions paying very high fees at no
> cost because they get the fees back to themselves. They can do this for
> different purposes, like trying to increase the recommended fee. Here I
> propose a backwards-compatible solution to this problem.
>
> The solution would be to reward the fees of the current block to the miner
> of the next block (or X blocks after the current one). That way, if a miner
> floods its own block with very high fee transactions, those fees are no
> longer given back to itself, but to the miner of future blocks which could
> potentially be anyone. Flooding blocks with fake txs is now discouraged.
> However, filling blocks with real transactions paying real fees is still
> encouraged because you could be the one to mine the block that would claim
> this reward.
>
> The way to implement this in a backwards-compatible fashion would be to
> enforce miners to set an anyone-can-spend output in the coinbase
> transaction of the block (by adding this as a rule for verifying new
> blocks). The miner of 100 blocks after the current one can add a secondary
> transaction spending this block's anyone-can-spend coinbase transaction
> (due to the coinbase needing 100 blocks to mature) and thus claiming the
> funds. This way, the block reward of a block X is always transferred to the
> miner of block X+100.
>
> Implementing this would require a soft-fork. Since that secondary
> transaction needs no signature whatsoever, the overhead caused by that
> extra transaction is negligible.
>
> Possible Downside: When the fork is activated, the miners won’t get any
> reward for mining blocks for a period of 100 blocks. They could choose to
> power off the mining equipment for maintenance or to save power over that
> period, so the hashrate could drop temporarily. However, if the hashrate
> drops too much, blocks would take much longer to mine, and miners wouldn’t
> want that either since they want to go through those 100 reward-less blocks
> as soon as possible so they can start getting rewards from mining again.
>
>
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>


-- 
Lucas Clemente Vella
lvella@gmail.com