Author: Adam Back 2013-05-14 20:07:31
Published on: 2013-05-14T20:07:31+00:00
Jeff Garzik, in a conversation with Adam on May 14, 2013, discussed different ways of rewarding miners for their work of verifying transactions and adding new blocks to the blockchain. Jeff mentioned that if a promised transaction to the miner is not an integral part of the reward transaction, the user may choose to withhold it, which is not good. He referred to a standard, fee-bearing, user-created bitcoin transaction where the output value goes to the first miner who includes that transaction in a block as part of the protocol.However, Jeff also pointed out that such a method is inferior because it slightly spams the bitcoin payment protocol, involves actual money, and traceability to real-name. Instead, he suggested that one should proof that they directly mined a block with a coinbase that immediately makes payment to future miners. This method has several advantages: it doesn't create new traffic for the bitcoin network (except when mining a whole block), anyone with reasonable verification on the blockchain head can verify it without any other network traffic, and it can be bound to the service if micro-mined on the spot.Jeff believed that ideally, one needs to simultaneously mine and give a reward to future block miners. If that's not possible, then one could mine for the reward of the bitcoin foundation, software author, or service provider. In the case of a service provider, it's an extreme form of Rivest's peppercoin probabilistic payment.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T16:48:09.946388+00:00