Minimum fees

Summary:

The bitcoin community has not seen a situation where the coinbase drops below fees on any chain. Federations like RSK or additional layers like LN can be used as an example of what happens if there are no additional coins. In RSK, all coins are backed by BTC, so all you have is what users deposited. In LN, there are nodes, and channels are formed only with existing coins, where there is no mining, so all fees collected by nodes are based only on LN transaction fees. Even when coins are worthless, it is still possible to create a coinbase transaction with zero coins, which is still used in all block-based calculations. If there is no coins, then the chain is not going to be halted. It is still possible to create a coinbase transaction with zero coins, and it is still used in all block-based calculations, so mining such blocks can prevent other miners from reorging older blocks, and taking those fees. On 2023-03-04 18:32:01 user Andrew Melnychuk Oseen via bitcoin-dev wrote about his opinion that as bitcoin's capabilities grow, demand for it will as well. There are a lot of efforts to increase the amount of transactions that can fit into a block. The combination of limited block space and a reduced amount of bitcoin's entering the market is the right combination for the system to self-sustain. Giuseppe B proposed a new protocol rule min_fees, that would work like this: the miner that gets to mine a block appends a min_fee field to the block, specifying the minimum fees that need to be contained in the following block in order for it to be valid. One can also mine an empty block and reset the min_fee, to avoid the chain getting stuck. Min_fees could either represent the total fees of the following block, or the minimal fee for each single transaction, as a percentage of the value transacted. Both seem to have some merits and some potential drawbacks.

Updated on: 2023-06-16T15:59:32.976045+00:00