Author: Tom Harding 2017-03-30 15:38:20
Published on: 2017-03-30T15:38:20+00:00
The discussion on the centralization effect of rising fees on small miners using pools was brought up in a conversation on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list. Raystonn argued that low node costs are an important goal for nodes that handle transactions, as nobody will run a node for a network they do not use for their own transactions. If transactions have fees that prohibit most economic activity, node count will drop until nodes are generally run by those who settle large amounts, leading to centralization. Small miners use pools for smaller, more frequent payments, and rising fees force them to take payments less frequently, which could make them give up. This centralizing effect is much stronger than the oft-cited worry of small miners joining large pools to decrease orphan rates. Jared Lee Richardson also weighed in, stating that more consensus is needed for any blocksize increase to be agreed upon, as the proportion of users believing no blocksize increases are needed is larger than the hardfork target core wants (95% consensus). The Big-blocks faction and the low-node-costs faction may not even have a simple majority of support, making it critical that consensus is reached despite potential challenges.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T23:05:23.509284+00:00