Author: Dave Hudson 2015-05-31 14:17:10
Published on: 2015-05-31T14:17:10+00:00
The email conversation talks about an incentives question that arises if the mining fees become large enough to be interesting. The best interest of the system would be to select the block that confirms the largest number of transactions, but this is at odds with the incentives for the block maker since they would want to use the block that leaves the largest potential fees available, which is generally the smaller of the two. This issue only gets worse as the block reward reduces and fees become the dominant way for miners to be paid. This could lead to miners trying to orphan earlier blocks to "steal" fees because the fixed block reward is no longer the dominant part of their income. Moreover, coupled with the block propagation delay problem, there is an increasing risk of orphan races. Thus, miners may have an incentive to continually mine smaller blocks. Additionally, the question remains whether smaller blocks will push up fees, which also benefits miners.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T21:49:54.691487+00:00