Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Security problems with relying on transaction fees for security

From: Bram Cohen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2022 19:47:43 -0700

On Mon, Jul 11, 2022 at 2:53 PM Peter Todd <[email-masked]> wrote:

>
> The only type of fee-smoothing scheme that is feasible is to smooth an
> entirely
> separate category of fees that are made mandatory. For example, you could
> achieve the economic impact of inflation by having a fixed value*time
> based fee
> that goes to timelocked anyone-can-spend outputs in the coinbase to push
> the
> fee forward to other miners.
>

I'm not sure what the implications would be of charging coins for moving
based on their value times how long since they last moved would be (I
*think* that's what you're suggesting). It isn't obviously bad, but feels
weird to me.

That said, a scheme which would work would be to have a fixed minimum fee
of satoshis/vbyte which is required to be repaid out by the miner into a
pool and they get back a fixed fraction of what was in that pool. The pool
could simply be a rolling coin which keeps the balance. That's still a bit
ugly but doesn't lessen block size significantly, is fairly coherent, and
is a soft fork. It's the best emergency measure I'm aware of.