Published on: 2018-01-30T03:52:21+00:00
In an email exchange, Gregory Maxwell and Eric Voskuil discussed the concept of block space ownership in Bitcoin. Voskuil argued that miners have the right to sell or not sell block space since it belongs to them. However, Maxwell pointed out that as users of Bitcoin, they collectively pay miners around $130k USD per block in the form of inflation for the job of complying with the Bitcoin protocol. While there is subsidy involved, miners still accept a net loss by purchasing space for themselves if they do not accept the highest fee transactions. Maxwell also dispelled the idea of "retaliation" against miners who purchase block space, stating that it is not possible or desirable to detect the source of transactions in a system without identity. He further explained that reducing returns to miners would simply result in a reduction of hash power and not a decrease in transaction costs.In an email conversation on January 29, 2018, Eric Voskuil argued that block space created by a miner is the property of the miner, which can be sold or not sold. However, this argument is weak given that Bitcoin users collectively pay miners around $130k USD per block as inflation for complying with the Bitcoin protocol. It is unclear whether miners have more right to this payment than Bitcoin users have to run software that invalidates the coinbase outputs of miners who do not comply with the protocol. Such retaliation could be targeted against non-compliant miners.In a discussion on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Gregory Maxwell and Eric Voskuil debated the idea that miners gain an advantage by mining empty blocks or rejecting higher-fee transactions. While Voskuil argued that this was a myth, Maxwell suggested that there might be some truth to it, given that empty blocks are more conspicuous and could invite retaliation, especially with high levels of mining centralization. However, he also noted that dummy transactions are just as conspicuous, and underfilled blocks are produced without any apparent retaliation. Maxwell further argued that since block space created by a miner is the miner's property, it can be sold or not sold, without any harm to others.In a recent bitcoin-dev email thread, Eric Voskuil and an unknown source debunked the myth that miners have an advantage over those buying block space. Voskuil believes this idea is complete nonsense and even steel-manned it by arguing that empty blocks could invite retaliation due to high levels of mining centralization creating retaliation exposure. However, he points out that dummy transactions are hardly less conspicuous and many nodes log when blocks show up containing transactions they've never seen before. Furthermore, underfilled blocks are produced by Bitmain's Antpool without any retaliation forthcoming.The context involves a discussion among members of the bitcoin-dev mailing list regarding whether or not miners incur a cost by leaving transactions out of a block. Some members argue that miners do pay a cost by not being rewarded those fees, while others argue that this is not a question of cost but rather incentive compatibility. Additionally, there is debate about whether miners fill their blocks with transactions paying very high fees at no cost because they get the fees back themselves, and if so, how to discourage this behavior. One proposed solution is to reward the fees of the current block to the miner of the next block (or X blocks after the current one), which would discourage flooding blocks with fake transactions. However, there are concerns about the possible downside of this solution, such as a temporary drop in hashrate if miners power off their equipment during the period without rewards. Overall, the discussion revolves around the incentives and costs for miners in the bitcoin network.Miners are not rewarded with fees if they leave transactions out of a block. If they include their own spam transactions, they gain nothing and incur a cost. However, since blocks can have fees resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars, it would seem unlikely that miners incur a huge cost for not including transactions. A proposal was made by Nathan Parker to reward the fees of the current block to the miner of the next block (or X blocks after the current one) to discourage miners from flooding their own blocks with very high fee transactions. The solution would be implemented in a backwards-compatible fashion by enforcing miners to set an anyone-can-spend output in the coinbase transaction of the block. The miner of 100 blocks after the current one can add a secondary transaction spending this block's anyone-can-spend coinbase transaction and thus claim the funds. This way, the block reward of a block X is always transferred to the miner of block X+100. Implementing this would require a soft-fork. When the fork is activated, miners wouldn’t get any reward for mining blocks for a period of 100 blocks, which could cause the hashrate to drop temporarily.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T22:34:14.759912+00:00