Author: Aaradhya Chauhan 2022-08-03 18:22:32
Published on: 2022-08-03T18:22:32+00:00
The discussion on the possibility and feasibility of low-fee transactions in Bitcoin continues on the bitcoin-dev mailing list. Some nodes may accept zero to one satoshi per virtual byte transactions while some miners may choose to accept only 10 sats/vB or higher. However, the de-facto standard is one satoshi per virtual byte. The fees are not a part of the consensus, so they can be freely adjusted by each node, and there is no way to make sure what rules are really executed. It's only possible to judge based on how nodes behave, and one cannot make sure in any way if anyone is running some additional rules. Peter Todd suggests a way to rate-limit access to a broadcast network used by a small minority of nodes by using a hashcash-based alternative broadcast scheme. This would involve attaching work to low fee transactions as compensation and/or spam proof, but it suffers from ASICs. The discussion also includes a compensation scenario where wallets commit to the latest blockchain state in the transaction and attach work, which is considered a contribution to security and rewarded by fee discount/exemption depending on the offset of the state they've committed to and the amount of work attached. However, this scheme is hard to balance with ASICs in the scene too, for instance, miners can easily do it locally, seizing the subsidies for themselves.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T23:25:25.646401+00:00