Author: Mike Hearn 2015-07-29 09:59:43
Published on: 2015-07-29T09:59:43+00:00
The idea that a fee market was always part of Bitcoin's design is incorrect. Initially, there was no block size limit and it was believed that the economic constraints of the fee market would naturally develop. However, this hypothesis failed after a sudden influx of new users which made it too easy to attack the network. As a temporary anti-spam measure, a one megabyte block size limit was implemented.Contrary to popular belief, the limit had nothing to do with fees. Satoshi explicitly wanted free transactions to last as long as possible. Additionally, Satoshi envisioned a future where only miners ran nodes, so validators not being compensated was never an issue in his design.Non-mining, non-rpc-serving, non-Qt-wallet-sustaining full nodes are only needed for filtering the chain for bandwidth-constrained SPV wallets, relaying validated transactions for a better user interface, and storing the mempool and filtering/serving it for SPV wallets to find transactions broadcast before they started. Outside of serving lightweight P2P wallets, there is no purpose in running a P2P node if you aren't mining or using it as a trusted node for your own operations.Miners who don't validate have a habit of losing money, which is how the system is designed to work. A mechanism for thin clients to securely obtain reasonably secure, short proofs for their transactions did materialize and was designed by someone else. However, someone who came along much later has retroactively decided that the work done so far fails to meet some arbitrary and undefined level of perfection.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T04:05:39.497240+00:00