Author: Mark Friedenbach 2014-04-21 03:58:58
Published on: 2014-04-21T03:58:58+00:00
Jonathan Levin is a post-graduate economist who is writing a paper on the incentives of mining. He wants to calculate the change in the curvature of the probability mass function that a block hears about his block in any given second as a function of the block size. Levin believes that it is important to get a sense of the magnitude of the incentives at play and determine what implications this has for the transaction fee market. Levin thinks that the marginal cost for miners does not stem from the private cost of the miner validating the signature and including it in the list of transactions in the block but rather the increased probability that the block will be orphaned as a result of slower propagation. He is concerned about the fact that propagation delays result in increasing returns to higher shares of the hashing power. Large pools may publish large blocks to increase propagation delays on the network, which would increase orphan rates, particularly for small miners and miners that have not invested in sufficient bandwidth/connectivity.Levin has used some empirical data, but he ideally wants analytical solutions. He also finds it concerning that if a small miner hears about a block after 4.5 seconds on average, there is a 0.7% chance that there is already a block in circulation, and large miners can increase the time it takes for small miners to hear about blocks by increasing the size of their blocks. Levin is also curious to know whether orphans are probabilistic and only resolved after hearing about a new block that lengthens the chain, or if there is a way to know in advance.In a separate discussion, people in the Bitcoin community are debating on using “bits” as a unit of account. However, some members argue that "credit" should be used instead of "bits" because Bitcoin is not a credit-based system. The community also discusses the need for culturally neutral terminologies to avoid deliberately invoking a cultural reference in the name. The email thread is from the Bitcoin-development mailing list in 2014 discussing a unit of account for Bitcoin. One user suggests "ubit" to represent 1e-6 bitcoin. Another user mentions that "bit" phonetically collides with slang in French and Turkish, and suggests a culturally neutral term. There is also discussion on how terms arise naturally and there may not be a need for a smaller unit term yet. The thread ends with an advertisement for eXo Platform software. The email thread is part of the Bitcoin-development mailing list archive hosted by SourceForge.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T20:31:17.886667+00:00