Author: Juan Garavaglia 2017-03-28 14:38:40
Published on: 2017-03-28T14:38:40+00:00
The email thread on the bitcoin-dev mailing list discusses ways to encourage "good" miners and discourage those who mine empty or small blocks. One suggestion is to add a preference for mined blocks with more transactions when two blocks of the same height are found. This would incentivize full blocks, as miners wouldn't be able to assume that a smaller block would win them the reward. However, this could also encourage miners to fill up their blocks with junk transactions, leaving larger, more space-efficient transactions in the mempool.Another issue discussed is that miners may not have an incentive to build upon the block with a set of transactions more similar to what they themselves would include based on their mempool at the time. Instead, they may be better off building upon the block that leaves the most valuable transactions in the mempool, such as a small or empty block, and leave some valuable transactions in the mempool for the next miner. A soft-fork that requires miners to pay a portion of their fees to future miners could address this problem. The email also mentions that if a miner tries to hurt the network by mining empty blocks, the rest of the miners will start rejecting their blocks, causing them to lose the reward incentive and join the behavior of the rest of the miners.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:38:02.497592+00:00