Author: Peter Todd 2013-10-25 22:13:27
Published on: 2013-10-25T22:13:27+00:00
In an email exchange, Bitcoin developer Jeremy Spilman suggested that wallets should be able to "actively bid" for fees using replacement due to block contention. While fee estimation APIs can serve as a data point and decrease the need for recovery, estimates are always imperfect and conservative estimates can be inefficient without a good mechanism to recover from initial bad estimates. Fee estimation needs to take into account size and type of transactions, age of inputs, number of inputs versus outputs, output amounts, and what fee policies miners are actually using. However, there is not much reason for miners to take anything other than fee-per-KB into account when determining what transactions to mine. Transaction inclusion is more a matter of supply and demand than policy with size-limited blocks. The current logic behind orphans is rather worrying as miners may start working to extend a block with one that either doesn't contain any transactions or only contains transactions they can reasonably ensure another miner didn't mine when they learn that a block exists via the quickly propagating block header.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T18:13:15.025804+00:00