Author: Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn 2012-05-26 05:03:15
Published on: 2012-05-26T05:03:15+00:00
Zooko, a developer and CEO of Zcash, questions whether the problem of low transaction fees in Bitcoin is actually a problem. He suggests that increasing transaction fees may be the best solution to incentivize people to include more fees. In fact, he thinks that the current situation encourages people to adopt this solution. However, Zooko believes the reward for mining should be more commensurate with the value it provides. He suggests that each transaction fee should be proportionate to the value of the transaction. Zooko refers to miners as "distributed transaction verification servers" to convey that they are providing a useful service rather than gaining undeserved reward for wasting electricity. He predicts that transaction fees will eventually rise, but sooner might be better, especially with the first coinbase-halving looming. Zooko suggests that users may be motivated to include transaction fees if they know that some miners do not bother to validate their transactions while others do. They may feel motivated to reward the miners that are serving them and punish the ones that are not.Users may also want to counteract the added delay that no-transactions miners add to all transactions by putting a fee on their transactions to make them take less time when processed by a miner that processes some transactions. Zooko highlights a visualization that shows that transactions with fees sometimes perform better than free transactions. He mentions that the presence of no-transactions miners may help push the aggregate fees up, which is something he would like to see.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T04:42:01.749343+00:00