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

From: Joel Joonatan Kaartinen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 9 May 2015 01:36:56 +0300

such a contract is a possibility, but why would big owners give an
exclusive right to such pools? It seems to me it'd make sense to offer
those for any miner as long as the get paid a little for it. Especially
when it's as simple as offering an incomplete transaction with the
appropriate SIGHASH flags.

a part of the reason I like this idea is because it will allow stakeholders
a degree of influence on how large the fees are. At least from the surface,
it looks like incentives are pretty well matched. They have an incentive to
not let the fees drop too low so the network continues to be usable and
they also have an incentive to not raise them too high because it'll push
users into using other systems. Also, there'll be competition between
stakeholders, which should keep the fees reasonable.

I think this would at least be preferable to the "let the miner decide"
model.

- Joel

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 7:51 PM, Peter Todd <[email-masked]> wrote:

> 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
> 00000000000000000f53e2d214685abf15b6d62d32453a03b0d472e374e10e94
>