Author: Eric Voskuil 2018-01-29 00:46:51
Published on: 2018-01-29T00:46:51+00:00
Miners often accept less than the optimal set of transactions due to the time it takes to compute the optimal set. The more efficient a miner is at computing a set, the more profitable they will be. However, intentionally not accepting the most optimal set possible is a cost rather than a source of increased returns. Miners can raise the historical fee level by paying this real cost, just as any other person would submit a competitive-fee transaction. They cannot recover this cost and have no place of advantage in terms of competing for block space. The current competition for block space determines future prices rather than historical prices. A proposal was made on the bitcoin-dev mailing list to discourage miners from flooding their own blocks with high fee transactions. The proposal suggests rewarding the fees of the current block to the miner of the next block (or X blocks after the current one). If a miner floods their own block with very high fee transactions, those fees are no longer given back to themselves, but to the miner of future blocks. This discourages flooding blocks with fake transactions while encouraging filling blocks with real transactions paying real fees since the miner could be the one to mine the block that claims this reward. Implementing this would require a soft-fork, and a possible downside is that miners wouldn’t get any reward for mining blocks for a period of 100 blocks when the fork is activated. They could choose to power off the mining equipment for maintenance or to save power over that period, so the hashrate could drop temporarily.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T00:16:02.480109+00:00