Author: Gavin Andresen 2013-11-13 23:52:41
Published on: 2013-11-13T23:52:41+00:00
The average fee for Bitcoin transactions is currently very close to the modeled minimum orphan cost, which may be attributed to the power of inefficient markets to arrive at a correct price. The messy market with tens of thousands of individual decisions may have arrived at the 'correct' price, even if nobody involved has any clue how or why it happened. However, it could also just be a coincidence. The network-wide orphan rate has been steady apart from the March blockchain fork. Reduction in the size of new block announcements can be achieved through transmitting and relaying as "merkleblock" with full bloom filters. Mining revenue is a fixed-size pie; hence, if everyone agrees to accept somewhat higher orphan rates for more transaction volume, there is no difference. However, this is a classic free-rider problem because a miner could defect to try to get a lower orphan rate. Thus, relaying all blocks in a race is probably the right thing to do. If a miner loses the occasional block race for creating blocks that don't include "enough" already-relayed transactions, they will be mildly punished, which is a strong incentive to go along with whatever consensus has been established.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T20:06:57.497436+00:00