Author: Anthony Towns 2022-02-17 14:32:25
Published on: 2022-02-17T14:32:25+00:00
The bitcoin-dev mailing list featured a discussion between Matt Corallo and Darosior about the complexity of ensuring a miner's overall revenue increase. Darosior argued that as a miner, they would not want a low fee transaction to replace a high fee transaction in their mempool. However, the loss in fees for the miner would be minimal. Therefore, the economically rational choice would be to trade-off that immediate loss against even a small chance of a simpler policy encouraging higher adoption of Bitcoin or more on-chain activity due to higher adoption of Bitcoin protocols like Lightning.The article goes on to discuss different algorithms and mempool policies for replacing transactions in the Bitcoin network. Four different techniques are compared, resulting in varying percentages of the total possible fees collected. The article notes that always accepting fee rate increases removes the possibility of pinning but could be abused for spamming transactions. To prevent this, spam prevention at the inbound tx level may be necessary.The article concludes by suggesting careful consideration of relay spam before implementing changes. It also mentions that having a few nodes with large mempools could help the network recover from such situations automatically. By doing so, it is possible to balance the needs of miners and the long-term growth of the network.
Updated on: 2023-05-22T17:20:55.371738+00:00