Author: Damian Williamson 2017-12-27 12:29:41
Published on: 2017-12-27T12:29:41+00:00
The discussion revolves around the proposal for revised UTPFOTIB (Use Transaction Priority For Ordering Transactions In Blocks), and its impact on miners' financial interests. The writer argues that full nodes can validate blocks conforming to a probability distribution, which will ensure transactional reliability for valid transactions. However, the introduction of the proposal does not change miners' incentive to falsify transactions as the miners want to fill blocks so that real transactions must pay the highest possible fees in the auction for limited transaction bandwidth resulting in a net gain for them. Larger block size serves no economic purpose in itself since the miners need to pay the fees for their falsified transactions. There is nothing stopping a motivated individual from flooding the mempool with fraudulent transactions even if fee is above dust level. The proposal ensures transactional reliability for valid transactions and provides a mechanism to increase block size which will incentivize miners to make up their own transactions to justify every block size increase. Proof-of-work algorithm proves that work was performed, and this work was done in the past. The blockchain itself is already a service that provides a measure of time. Thus one idea is to have each block commit to some view of the mempool. Unfortunately, transferring the data to prove that the mempool-view is valid, is equivalent to always sweeping the entire mempool contents per block. In addition, miners may still commit to a falsely-empty mempool and deny that your transaction is old and therefore priority and therefore will simply fill their blocks with transactions that have high feerates rather than high priority. On the other hand, developers can make use of existing mechanisms, RBF and CPFP, to allow transactions to be sped up by directly manipulating feerates, as priority (by the proposed measure) is not practically computable.The writer speculates that through increased adoption of Bitcoin over time, there would be more transactions and greater net fees paid per day. An increased value of BTC that follows from increased usage would augment this fee value increase. It surely follows that a more stable and reliable service will have greater consumer and business acceptance, and there it follows that this is in miners' financial interest. The writer concludes by stating that there may be a need to start all new nodes in pruned mode by default due to the onerous storage requirements of the full blockchain, but the proposed changes do not alter this.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T22:53:52.440294+00:00