Published on: 2013-10-28T07:17:50+00:00
The email exchanges discussed the need for better fee estimation and transaction replacement in Bitcoin. Gavin Andresen emphasized the importance of fee estimation and suggested that there may be better mechanisms for estimating fees. Andreas Petersson raised concerns about constantly monitoring transaction propagation and recreating transactions with different fees, especially for certain use cases like half-offline Bluetooth transactions. He proposed combining fee estimation with transaction replacement to give users a way to recover from bad estimates.Peter Todd suggested implementing an 'estimatefees' JSON-RPC api call to estimate the priority or fee needed for a transaction to be relayed across the network and included in the blockchain. He also discussed the need for an increasetxfee RPC command and an erasewallettx RPC command to handle duplicates. Todd offered a 4BTC bounty for a mempool implementation similar to replace-by-fee and believed that getting pools to use it would be relatively easy.The participants discussed the parameters they would like to see in a fee estimation API, such as processing time and confidence levels. They also highlighted the correlation between transaction fees and network security. Tamas Blummer stressed the importance of simplicity in blockchain technology and suggested a method for increasing transaction fees by spending unconfirmed outputs with higher fees.In a conversation between Mike Hearn and Peter Todd, the focus shifted to miners and their transaction acceptance policies. They discussed the possibility of customers wanting exclusive contracts with miners for non-standard transactions. It was emphasized that if a transaction is broadcasted, it should be mined promptly, otherwise indicating a problem. Todd suggested that miners should advertise in their coinbase what fees were actually paid to improve fee estimates. However, Hearn argued that some miners may have complex business models that don't neatly fit into the concept of a "fee." The discussion revealed challenges in determining and implementing effective fee structures within blockchain technology.In a separate email exchange, Peter Todd proposed enhancing fee estimates in out-of-band mining contracts by having miners advertise in their coinbase what fees were actually paid. Concerns were raised about miners with complex business models and the potential for fees to be pushed too low if private transactions were included. The estimates were solely based on broadcast transactions, highlighting the difficulty of accurately estimating fees within blockchain technology.Another suggestion was made to improve fee estimates in out-of-band mining contracts by having miners broadcast transactions with competitive fees to incentivize immediate mining. Additionally, miners could advertise an address to which transactions can be submitted, providing a proof-of-work mechanism to verify significant mining work. While this approach has drawbacks, it offers a different security model compared to other bootstrapping methods.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T06:14:43.395768+00:00