Author: micaroni at gmail.com 2022-07-11 18:38:34
Published on: 2022-07-11T18:38:34+00:00
The Bitcoin community is concerned about the future of transaction fees, as they are not consistent and often go to zero overnight or during weekends and holidays. This inconsistency can cause problems for Bitcoin's security if it becomes entirely dependent on transaction fees. The fear is that there will be no or very few blocks mined overnight, and eventually miners with lower costs of operation will figure out how to reorganize the last hour of the day overnight, making it profitable. This 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, existing experience suggests that having transaction fees be about 10% of rewards on average works well. Measures that smooth out fees over time, such as wallets opportunistically collecting their dust during times of low transaction fees, would help save users on fees. Also, making UX that clarifies when things are likely to take a day or week but that it's reliable would be a reasonable thing to do. However, users are unfortunately very averse to transactions taking a while. There are a few possible fixes, including dragging most of East Asia eastward to a later time zone to smooth out the day/night cycle, hard forking in fixed rewards in perpetuity, or other measures that smooth out fees over time.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T22:51:03.277048+00:00