Author: vjudeu at gazeta.pl 2022-07-11 19:45:39
Published on: 2022-07-11T19:45:39+00:00
The current day/night cycle of Bitcoin transaction fees is likely to become a serious problem for security if Bitcoin becomes entirely dependent on fees. This is because the fees go to zero overnight and even longer gaps on weekends and holidays. Therefore, there will be very few blocks mined overnight, and miners will have to wait until there are enough fees in the mempool before attempting to make a block. However, this strategy will eventually lead to miners reorging the last hour (or some time period) of the day overnight, which will become profitable. This situation could lead to a slippery slope to a mining cabal that reorgs everyone else out of existence and eventually 51% attacks the whole thing. To avoid this disaster, relying completely on transaction fees for security is not recommended. Instead, existing experience shows that having transaction fees about 10% of rewards on average works well. Several possible approaches to fixes include dragging most of east Asia eastward to a later time zone, hard-forking in fixed rewards in perpetuity, or measures that smooth out fees over time. Measures that can smooth out fees include having wallets opportunistically collect their dust during times of low transaction fees and creating a UX that clarifies when things are likely to take a day or week but that it's reliable.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T22:48:11.214421+00:00