Author: Eric Lombrozo 2015-06-14 04:50:39
Published on: 2015-06-14T04:50:39+00:00
Eric Lombrozo, a Bitcoin developer, agrees with Stephen's critique that the voting mechanism proposed by Jeff Garzik would be unusable to most end-users without elaborate tools and without paying substantially higher fees than they are currently paying. In addition, it is not clear that most users would be able to make rational economic decisions even with elaborate tools. Instead, a small group is likely to figure out ways to exploit this for their own benefit at everyone else's expense. Stephen argues that while the idea of involving many stakeholders, rather than just miners, is theoretically interesting, in practice, it would not work well. Users want to be able to make a transaction without worrying about technicalities. Furthermore, the fees users supply are marginal compared to the block size subsidy, so if this proposal were implemented, miners would vote for whatever they think is best, and users would not contradict them with their votes to ensure a fast confirmation time. This is because users are incentivized to be in agreement with miners because the miners provide confirmations, but fees do not provide a great incentive for miners to be in agreement with users, and likely won't for some time. Peter Todd's proposal involves adding a mechanism within the protocol for users to have influence over the miner vote. By providing a way for transactions themselves to set a flag determining whether or not they can be included in a block casting a specific vote, users can influence the vote according to their wishes. Transactions may only be included in blocks with an identical vote, thus providing miners with a monetary incentive via fees to vote according to user wishes. John Dillon's proposal for proof-of-stake blocksize voting is also mentioned.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T22:53:36.596601+00:00