Author: Daniele Pinna 2015-08-26 22:22:42
Published on: 2015-08-26T22:22:42+00:00
The writer questions the community's acceptance of complex miner voting protocols as a hard fork option, while considering Mike and Gavin redirecting the course of the Bitcoin protocol as risky. They believe that Peter_R’s analysis of fee markets in the absence of blocksize limits has not been given enough weight by the community. The critiques made towards his work were not definitive, but discussions stopped. The writer suggests that a controlled raising of the max blocksize in the interim to ease into the fee market dynamic described is the best option. The main critique to uncapped max blocksizes is the advantage that large miners have over smaller ones. However, the writer argues that these advantages do not stem from propagating large blocks but rather from block subsidies allowing miners to mine unnecessary large blocks regardless of the fees contained therein. Exponential increases to the max blocksize make sense since the block reward decreases exponentially also. The writer hopes this matter gets the consideration it deserves, particularly with the upcoming scaling workshops. Peter_R's analysis shows that the hashrate advantage of a large miner is a side-effect of coinbase subsidization. As the block rewards get smaller, so will large miner advantages. The main critique of larger blocksizes is that connected miners can cut out smaller miners by filling up blocks with self-paying transactions. This only works because block subsidies exist. The moment block rewards become comparable to block TX fees, this exploit ceases to be functional. Large miners will still be forced to move full blocks, but it will go against their interest to fill them with spam since their main source of income is the fees themselves. In this context, large blocksizes, as proposed by BIP100-101, hope to stimulate the increase of TX fees by augmenting the network's capacity. The sooner block rewards become comparable to block fees, the sooner we will get rid of mine centralization.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T21:06:22.754445+00:00