Author: Andrew 2018-09-15 16:01:19
Published on: 2018-09-15T16:01:19+00:00
A developer named Andrew proposed the addition of "reserve fees" in bitcoin mining to prevent selfish mining attacks and collusion, as well as other subtle attacks like block withholding. The reserve fees would be a fraction of the total fee that is held in "reserve" for a certain period of time. If the hashrate rises, the reserve fee will be paid to miners. This approach should incentivize miners not to drive out competition since they will receive less of these reserve fees if they do. The miner will get all the fees eventually, but with rising hashrate, they get an unconditional subsidy that doesn't require transactions, allowing more space for transactions with fees. Hashrate plays an essential role in this proposal, and there is a need to know interest before implementing it. Andrew also raised concerns about selfish mining, an attack where miners collude to mine at a lower hashrate than with all miners working independently. He suggested allowing the block reward to be modulated according to peak hashrate. However, he acknowledged that easier mining would be present for early miners, so it would have to be done in combination with a new, more dynamic difficulty adjustment algorithm. As hashrate can't continue to rise indefinitely, a solution should be made for selfish mining. In response to the proposal, Damian Williamson expressed concerns about the incentivization of increased global resource consumption and its potential harm to the environment. He argued that the debt-based economy forces continuous growth and resource consumption, while collectivism turns individuals into super-organisms capable of doing much more harm to the environment than can be done by one or just a few individuals working independently. In his proposal, Andrew allowed for changing environmental conditions by measuring only the peak hashrate of the past year, rather than the full history of blocks.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T14:37:48.563572+00:00