Author: Luke-Jr 2012-05-24 20:31:38
Published on: 2012-05-24T20:31:38+00:00
Jeff Garzik raised concerns about non-trivial mining power being devoted to mining empty blocks, despite Satoshi's observation that hashing a fixed 80-byte header is sufficient. He proposed two changes: not storing or relaying empty blocks if time since the last block exceeds 60 minutes, and ensuring the latest block includes at least X percent of mempool unconfirmed TXs. However, these changes would restrict the freedom of legitimate miners to reject transactions based on fees or spam filters, which is an important aspect of Bitcoin's design. Moreover, illegitimate miners could easily find workarounds to these restrictions, putting legitimate miners at a disadvantage. The argument that these are not rule changes is flawed because most of the network runs a single client, making anything this client rejects a de facto rule change. Additionally, discouragement rules could greatly affect the odds of finding a block, and if legitimate miners do not adopt counter-rules, illegitimate miners would have an even larger percentage of blocks found. Overall, such changes as proposed would be very harmful to Bitcoin.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T04:41:35.978998+00:00