Published on: 2015-09-12T18:55:03+00:00
The Bitcoin transaction fee is calculated based on the sum of input age weighted by value and divided by transaction size in bytes. Vincent Truong expressed concerns about how this could alter the prioritization of transactions in order to win, potentially resulting in a bad outcome for Bitcoin's fungibility.The proposal suggests a new policy aimed at improving the way transactions are prioritized by miners. The suggested heuristic involves comparing the Bitcoin Days Destroyed (BTCDD) of two valid blocks and choosing the one with the best BTCDD, but only for transactions that are already in the mempool. This policy would benefit Bitcoin in terms of increased stability, motivating miners to add transactions, decreasing the utility of any global private network of nodes intended to spread selfishly-mined blocks, and motivating miners to stay well-connected so that they get transactions quickly. However, the proposal is not a consensus rule and everyone would be free to ignore it.The proposal suggests a new heuristic for miners to choose between two valid blocks they receive, which is to compare the BTCDD (Bitcoin Days Destroyed) of transactions already present in their mempool and weigh it so that older transactions are more important. This would increase bitcoin stability by making it easier for clients to decide which block is valid when they see two competing with each other, motivating miners to add transactions instead of mining empty blocks, decreasing the utility of any global private network of nodes intended to spread selfishly-mined blocks, and motivating miners to stay well-connected so that they get transactions quickly.The discussion revolves around the proposal made by Dave Scotese via bitcoin-dev mailing list. He proposed a more sophisticated method of choosing which of two block solutions to accept instead of using the 'first-seen' block. There is confusion about how to determine which of 2 blocks with the same height is newer. It is also discussed whether miners would benefit from running the proposed policy in the long run or not. There is always a default, and if miners don't have any overriding reason to change, they'll likely stick to it. Any changed logic is non-binding. If miners don't use the proposed policy, users won't benefit from running that policy themselves either. They will still have to wait for block confirmation to reduce the chances of a successful double-spend attack with each new confirmation.In an email thread titled "Alternate tie-breaker proposal" on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list, Christophe Biocca and Jorge Timón discuss Dave Scotese's proposal for a more sophisticated method of choosing which of two block solutions to accept. Biocca believes that it is not necessary since miners would not benefit from running this policy in the long run, and users would still have to keep waiting for block confirmations to reduce the chances of a successful double-spend attack. Timón points out that there is already a criterion to choose between two blocks: the one with more work in valid blocks on top of it. However, the issue of determining which of two blocks with the same height is "newer" remains unclear.Dave has proposed a new method of choosing between two block solutions. He suggests that instead of using the first-seen block, a more sophisticated tie-breaker should be used. This new heuristic could lead miners to safely mine a sibling block instead of a child block when a new block with the most work is seen and there are no ties. However, it also opens up the possibility for miners to double-spend some confirmed transactions and orphan a small non-empty block whenever the block confirming them is easily replaced. This could lower the security of 1-conf transactions. The risk can be measured and is sometimes very small, but this issue can be fixed by preferring non-empty blocks to empty ones or only switching if the new block doesn't double spend transactions in the old one. Jorge Timón states that there is already a criterion to choose between two block solutions: the one with more work (in valid blocks) on top of it.In a discussion on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Dave Scotese proposes a more sophisticated method for choosing which of two block solutions to accept. Rather than relying on the first-seen block, he suggests using the criterion of the one with more work (in valid blocks) on top of it. This proposal aims to improve the security and efficiency of the bitcoin network.The proposal suggests a sophisticated method for choosing between two block solutions by computing a weighted sum of bitcoin-days-destroyed (BTCDD), where transactions received earlier are given higher weights. This method avoids allowing miners to use private transactions to manipulate the blockchain and also makes empty blocks less attractive. The proposal was posted on the stackexchange bitcoin site, and after addressing objections and problems, no significant issues were found. While some may argue that empty blocks and selfish mining aren't harmful to Bitcoin, proponents of the proposal are encouraged to collaborate on an implementation.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T16:04:49.324544+00:00