Author: Stefan Thomas 2012-05-26 11:52:33
Published on: 2012-05-26T11:52:33+00:00
According to Zooko’s statement, slower confirmations can lead to people setting higher fees which will eventually lead botnet operators to look for ways of including transactions for extra profit. However, slightly slower confirmations are not a problem and even if it takes four blocks to get your transaction included instead of one, once the transaction is included, you still benefit from every new block in terms of security. Moreover, there are techniques for instant transactions which are being refined and improved continuously.The proposed solutions such as punishing 1-tx blocks or applying additional challenges towards miners like hashes of the previous block are considered useless. It is trivial to include a bogus second transaction and botnets can easily grab the hash from a website or mining pool. There is an ethical aspect as well and if a miner decides not to include someone's transaction, it’s their choice as they have no obligation to sell their service. To get a transaction included, one might have to offer to pay more.If developers think that confirmations are too slow or that more blocks should include transactions, then the right measures would be educating users about the relationship between confirmation speed and fees and raising the default transaction fee. In every market, there must be a certain tension where some miners do not include transactions simply because it is not worth it for them to sell their service, hence every market has a supply curve. If this balance is interfered with, it will disrupt the transition from inflation-financed hashing to transaction-financed hashing and keep transaction fees below market level.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T04:42:27.620286+00:00