Author: John Carvalho 2022-12-11 14:56:24
Published on: 2022-12-11T14:56:24+00:00
The context of the message is a debate about the incentive compatibility of Bitcoin transactions and their effect on mining income, user incentives, and the overall value and usefulness of Bitcoin. The author, John Carvalho, questions the quality of current theory and criticizes the bias towards mining incentives over user incentives in Bitcoin Core decision-making. He argues that a fully replaceable mempool and the obsoletion of zero-conf use cases could result in less overall mining income. He also suggests that active management by Bitcoin Core engineers could result in a less valuable and less useful Bitcoin. Carvalho highlights some interesting questions related to the topic such as whether it is inconsistent for Bitcoin Core to cater to mining incentives over user incentives when miners do not control Bitcoin. He also asks if it is Core's place to steer policy based on speculation about the future even when it conflicts with the present and past. Carvalho emphasizes the importance of questioning how, when, and whether Bitcoin software is changed, regardless of one's ability to create or audit code. Michael Folkson responds to Carvalho's post and suggests that he could benefit from doing more reading on the topic as there is a lot of past discussion. He explains that the job of P2P/mempool/policy protocol developers is to ensure anyone can effectively propagate a consensus valid transaction across the network without harming network health and to give higher layers built on top of the Bitcoin network the best chance to succeed. He argues that those who work full time in this area have a better understanding of policy defaults than others. Folkson provides reference links to a discussion on whether there is any point to a full node maintaining a mempool and a presentation on transaction relay policy. He summarizes his thoughts on the topic by stating that trade-offs have to be weighed up, and decisions have to be made where some people aren't happy. He is comfortable delegating responsibility for policy defaults to those who have worked full time in this area for years.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T03:21:37.398748+00:00