Topic: Permanently keeping the 1MB (anti-spam) restriction is a great idea ... - page 11. (Read 105082 times)

(Numbers made up.)

After the fork, the government could regularly post blocks with a million transactions in it. If it happened regularly enough, people would lower their transaction fees, and some profit-seeking miners would leave.

They can try to do the same thing before the fork, but each time they are limited to posting blocks with only 100 transactions in it. There's still scarcity, and fewer miners will leave.

Granted, scarcity is not driving mining at this time. But transaction fees were "supposed to" take over mining bounties (which I think is bad design, see below).


There are four groups of people (a) stakeholders, (b) saboteurs, (c) transactors, and (d) miners. With PoW, stakeholders want to protect their coins from saboteurs, and for some reason transactors pay miners to do so. That's pretty convoluted! Transactors and miners would be just as happy destroying the blockchain, if it enriched them somehow. (We've seen attack vectors along these lines.)

However, if block size is increased, there's really no reason why most miners won't include as many transactions as possible, since it doesn't really cost them anything. Transactors will no longer be required to pay to have their transactions included in the blockchain, and eventually profit-seeking miners will leave. Stakeholders will still need to protect their coins from saboteurs. Suddenly, stakeholders will either have to mine themselves, or send bitcoin to themselves with large fees, in order to keep miners in the game (which is inefficient, because sometimes the fees will go to saboteurs). In this scenario, we've realigned the costs of maintaining the integrity of the blockchain: the transaction fees have dropped, and stakeholders are paying to protect their coins. These are the same incentives as PoS.

However, this is a really inefficient way of determining which ledger is correct. There are at least two ways to do so:

(1) You can ask the stakeholders and the saboteurs to fight it out. The last one standing decides which ledger is correct. This is PoW.

(2) You can just ask the stakeholders which ledger is correct. This is PoS.

Thoughts?

And this is relevant because...?

This can happen anytime now. Why would it be any different after the fork?


I still don't get how you go from “Miners are mining at a loss” to “This is proof of stake”.

I'll be much more satisfied with SWIFT when I can be a full peer with Wells-Fargo using a router-sized server behind my satellite connection, and any of 100 million others can do so at will.

Ya, me.  I've been around for years and have been saying the same thing since pretty much day one.  I don't own any alts or have any interest in them.  I don't take a paycheck from some shadowy group of well funded coders who are making noise about taking over Bitcoin with a 'better' software.

I make a lot of noise about 'sidechains' because subordinate chains which derive their value from Bitcoin are a logical and natural scaling method which actually can work and keep Bitcoin healthy.  Possibly the only thing with a hope of doing so in fact.

Speaking of intellectual integrity, when are you going to share your infinite wisdom on the effects of IBLTs on 'natural' blocksizes?  I couldn't help notice that you've ignored my comment when I inserted it into your supposedly coherent argument that blocks should remain small even if the max size is raised 'cuz they always have.  You are not alone among people who want to remain mum on IBLTs though.

Don't worry! There will be a SWIFT-a-like sidechain that will regulate interplanetary transfers  

Just in case you were curious about mining bitcoin on other planets..

Blocking transactions? I don't think anyone was talking about that.

If "enough" miners don't require a fee, then some transactors will not send transactions with a fee, and many others will simply send insignificant fees (like now). Some miners that were mining for a profit will no longer be able to make a profit, and they will stop mining.

Despite what someone else claimed, this does not make confirmations take longer, increasing the price of transactions, and incentivizing more miners to mine, because of the fixed time to mine a block.

Either this will reduce the security of the bitcoin network, or stakeholders will mine "at a loss" to avoid losing their bitcoins.

And, it's silly to make stakeholders do PoW.

Add:

LOL, I didn't make that hypothesis. I don't know what you're talking about :-)

Miners aren't currently mining for transaction fees, because of how insignificant they are, so it's not really a good question.

https://blockchain.info/charts/network-deficit

But is "average transaction fee revenue" increasing or decreasing? It's kind of hard to tell...

https://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees

I'm not really in favor of small blocks, because I don't like the idea of incentivizing non-stakeholders to maintain the blockchain. I just think that this is a problem better solved with PoS. Let a stakeholder make a 1 GB block, for all I care.

On the other hand, the thought of letting a rando non-stakeholder (e.g., the government) make 1 GB blocks of ~0 fee transactions (or spam) makes me uneasy.

What? A miner that accepts transactions with no fees is not actively blocking transactions with fees. This point makes no sense.


Why are they no longer profitable? Your hypothesis about people not wanting to be with them (which, how will they choose? You CAN'T CHOOSE a miner) is incorrect.

Yeah, if I want my transaction to be picked up by a miner who doesn't require fees, I can just sit patiently.


Miners leave all the time when they're no longer profitable...

gosh rude. why not go and ask them? you know exactly where they are. weird to strut around in this non-place

The average block size has been increasing for six years.

Has the average transaction fee revenue increased or decreased over the same period?

Is there anyone in favour of small blocks who has the slightest bit of intellectual integrity whatsoever?

That's definitely not how it works. You can't just choose which miner will process your transaction.


This is all based on your assumption that miners will start leaving, which simply isn't true. There's no motivation for them to leave.

They'd stop mining because they wouldn't be profiting. It would be like if Amazon lowered the price of hot cakes to $0. Some other retailers would stop selling hot cakes.


As the bounty decreases, and if the transaction fees decrease (as a result of block size increasing), then non-stakeholders will have no (or decreasing) incentive to mine. Stakeholders, on the other hand, will need to mine to keep their bitcoins safe. It's no more "truly altruistic" than a bank hiring a security guard to protect its assets.

How much will a stakeholder or saboteurs need to spend on mining to protect / steal $100 in a PoW system? About $99.

How much will a stakeholder need to spend on mining to protect $100 from saboteurs in a PoS system? A lot less than the saboteurs... Right?

tldr; As we move the direct profit incentives for mining, the responsibility for maintaining the integrity of the blockchain will fall on stakeholders. PoW is a great way to distribute the initial coins, but it's a really inefficient way for stakeholders to "vote" on which chain is right.

Right?

Today most (all?) miners accept some zero fee transactions.  Yet fees have not gone down to zero.  They is a balance between cost and convenience.  If there wasn't then ATMs, convenience stores, and overnight mail wouldn't exist as services.

If 100% of miners will accept your txn for $0.05 in fees and 10% will accept your txn for free most rational users will still pick $0.05 in fees on many transactions.  Saving $0.05 usually doesn't make sense and in many cases ends up being the more expensive option (due to volatility risk).  We see this dynamic right now in every block.  There are plenty of "high priority" transactions which include a fee despite it not being required by the full nodes.  Unlike low priority transactions which will not be relayed by full nodes unless they include a fee, high priority transactions will be relayed without a fee so they are guaranteed to end up in the memory pool of miners.  At that point it is only a matter of time before they are included in a block.  The amount of space devoted to high priority transactions is however limited and that means transaction times for unpaid transactions are both long and unpredictable.  For many users the short and predictable confirmation times are worth more than the fee.

If someday 10% of the hashrate decided to include free transactions I think the rest of the miners would love that and probably reduce or eliminate the space they currently give away for free to include more paying transactions.

Or, if they made the blocksize a dynamic size and it is always updated to handle 99.9% of the transactions from the past two weeks so that the .1% that pay the least transaction fees might not get written in the next block.

VERY good point. Of course only few people decide that. same as exchanges.

the exchanges have behind the SAME shareholders(4-5). The entire BTC is owned by up to 10 people Funny !

not if you hoard your bitcoins.. all hail the new bankers

Why would they be motivated to do so? If there's no motivation, then the rest of the argument does not stand.


Why would these ones stop mining? They would still be profiting. I don't get it.


What's the logic here? If miners are not mining for transactions fees, they are still mining for the subsidy. Either that or it would be a truly altruistic act. And even if it was, they are not proving their stakes at all. They are still proving they have done some work.