Author: Gregory Maxwell 2013-02-24 00:56:48
Published on: 2013-02-24T00:56:48+00:00
In a conversation between Peter Todd and an anonymous source in 2013, it was discussed that fees would become the main source of income for miners in a low-subsidy future. This means that large miners may have an incentive to intentionally mine a block that would orphan the current best block in order to obtain the fees from that block. While a 1000BTC fee transaction is one possibility, more realistic examples could arise due to a large number of transactions with decent fees.The concern over slow convergence as miners try to orphan each other instead of fee sniping has been raised previously. However, what Peter Todd pointed out is that if there is a sufficient backlog or immature nlocktime of transactions with fees beyond the maximum block size, the incentive to orphan blocks to take their fees is greatly reduced or eliminated. In other words, if there are already enough high-fee transactions waiting to be added to the blockchain, miners will not have a reason to orphan blocks in search of more fees.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T16:33:06.872528+00:00