Author: Mark Friedenbach 2014-02-28 19:25:27
Published on: 2014-02-28T19:25:27+00:00
The writer of the message argues that transaction fees are broken because they do not cover the actual costs that full nodes incur in validating the blockchain. When a person makes a transaction, they pay a fee to a miner, but every other full node on the network also receives and processes the transaction without receiving any compensation for their storage, bandwidth, and processing costs. Even if a weak argument could be made that full nodes receive benefits from processing the blockchain as a payment network, this does not extend to general data storage. If someone were to put large amounts of data into the blockchain, such as all of Wikileaks, then every full node would be forced to process and store the data without compensation. This is not ethical behavior, and responsible developers should not allow it. The email includes a link to a commit on Github discussing how Bitcoin's transaction fees have failed to account for the actual cost to the network. The writer concludes that while there may not be an easy solution to this problem, simply tweaking the fee structure will not fix it.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T03:19:20.615494+00:00