Author: Jorge Timón 2014-04-21 13:04:35
Published on: 2014-04-21T13:04:35+00:00
The discussion is about whether miners should mine on top of a block's header and include no transactions or validation. There are concerns that this could harm the security of Bitcoin, but it is unlikely that someone would publish an invalid block since they would waste their proof-of-work (POW). It is presumed that new headers are correct, and miners can check the full block within a few minutes of receiving the header to increase security. Block propagation could take the form of broadcasting a new header, switching to mining empty blocks, broadcasting a new block, and updating to a block with transactions. If the block doesn't arrive within a timeout, then the miner could switch back to the old block. In any case, this is mining policy and therefore out of the realm of what the protocol can regulate, so we should assume miners will do whatever is best for them. The trade-off between tps and centralization remains: if you want higher tx volume, fewer full nodes will be able to process it.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T20:27:41.573703+00:00