Author: Pieter Wuille 2015-08-07 15:16:34
Published on: 2015-08-07T15:16:34+00:00
In a discussion on bitcoin-dev mailing list, Gavin Andresen suggested that if someone is willing to wait until an event where six blocks are found in ten minutes, they can submit their transaction with a low fee. All the higher-fee transactions will be confirmed in the first five blocks and in case miners don't have any floor on the fee they'll accept, then the very-low-fee transaction will get confirmed. However, this logic only works when the actual rate of transactions with a non-zero fee is below what fits in blocks. If the total production rate is higher, even without configured floor by miners, a free transaction won't ever be mined, as there will always be some backlog of non-free transactions. Gavin also mentioned that he has no idea what the 'market minimum fee' will be as it depends on how long people are willing to wait, how many times they'll be willing to retransmit a low-fee transaction that gets evicted from memory-limited memory pools, or how much memory miners will be willing to dedicate to storing transactions that won't confirm for a long time because they're waiting for a flurry of blocks to be found. It is uncertain whether blocks should be increased in response to such a scenario, but Gavin believes that this is why block size should be increased quickly and significantly.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T21:23:22.648456+00:00