Published on: 2017-03-28T14:38:40+00:00
The bitcoin-dev mailing list is currently discussing ways to incentivize "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 increase the incentive for full blocks, as miners wouldn't be able to assume that a smaller block would win them the reward. However, there are concerns that this could lead to miners filling up their blocks with junk transactions, leaving larger, more space-efficient transactions in the mempool.Another issue raised is that miners may not have an incentive to build upon blocks that contain transactions similar to what they themselves would include based on their mempool at the time. Instead, they may be better off building upon blocks that leave the most valuable transactions in the mempool, such as small or empty blocks, and leave some valuable transactions for the next miner. A proposed solution to this problem is a soft-fork that requires miners to pay a portion of their fees to future miners, encouraging them to include more valuable transactions in their blocks.It is also mentioned that if a miner tries to harm the network by mining empty blocks, the rest of the miners will start rejecting their blocks, causing them to lose the reward incentive and align with the behavior of the rest of the miners.The discussion focuses on promoting efficient transaction patterns on the blockchain. The current approach of incentivizing more transactions is criticized for being inefficient and promoting long transaction chains. Instead, it is suggested to incentivize miners to mine blocks that reduce the UTXO set size or another metric that promotes efficient use of the blockchain.The proposal put forward by Btc Ideas via bitcoin-dev is to add a preference for mined blocks with more transactions when two blocks of the same height are found. This would increase the incentive for full blocks and prevent miners from attacking the chain by mining small or empty blocks. However, it is acknowledged that there are still many ways in which miners can attack the chain.The relation between block size and propagation speed has been decoupled with the use of xthin/compact blocks, allowing miners to send a smaller version of a block that is recreated using the memory pool. This eliminates the need for revalidating transactions when a block is mined. However, it cannot be assumed that all transactions are publicly available. Miners creating bigger blocks as long as all transactions are in the mempool poses no downside. Withholding transactions still maintains the economic advantage of latency as a function of block size, potentially leading to centralization pressure.Overall, the discussion highlights the importance of promoting efficiency in transaction patterns on the blockchain and considering various metrics to incentivize miners towards this goal. The proposal to add a preference for blocks with more transactions is one potential solution, but further consideration and fleshing out of the idea is needed to address potential flaws and ensure its effectiveness.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T19:56:15.927518+00:00