The miner reward has dropped from BTC50 to BTC25 per mined block. This was planned from the beginning, and it will drop again.
If the value of BTC doubles, this is ok.
If the value of the transaction fees increases to fill the void, this is ok.
If miners make less money, this is ok, but does put an edge on my mining aspirations.
I am assuming that it is consistent with the original program design that some transactions, which I will call dross in this posting, are left behind: when the Pullman is full, there are no free loads.
Some people may feel urgency to have their transactions confirmed. The original model allows for variable auxiliary payments, which I will call bids in this posting, and unfortunately named fees, to expedite confirmation.
As a complete noob, I went to Daily Bitcoins, the site that gives BTC 0.00005 to look at an ad. I authorized BTC 0 transaction fee to pay out my new precious, and the transaction did not confirm until 4 AM. I repeated this for 3 or 4 days, then moved on to a verified account, connections with my bank, and a more solid connection to the Bitcoin community.
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I find myself fascinated by the SD dust conversation. I have read much this week, and my thoughts are slowly forming into an opinion.
It seems to me that having more transactions than space in the block is a wonderful situation for Bitcoin. There is clearly demand. For the moment, a noobie can try a zero fee transaction, go to the rest of his life, return in a day or so and explore his transaction on Blockchain without begging or being forced to pay or abandon his exploration. When I was moving real money on a bank holiday to a special auditing address for my Avalon purchase and time seemed precious, I had the easy option to pony up my bid and make it so.
I did grow up in a part of the country where anything in any way connected with gambling, sexuality, tobacco, alcohol, or excessive recreation was severely censored and suppressed. I still carry the legacy of that upbringing, and I cannot envision myself building a business in those areas. I find the values clarification conflict between neutral currency and judgement of SD or Silk Road to cause me some discomfort. I do wish they did not exist during those times I want to explain Bitcoin to people in my day life, but nonetheless, they do exist.
Nonetheless, I think that the existence of a full pay load for every block is healthy, provided that the miners are common carriers. I think that everyone who grew up in Dallas will ultimately decide that same thing, regardless of the nature of that pay load. I think that competition is healthy, and I think that a defining characteristic of competition is the possibility of loss. In this case, it is the loss of inclusion in the currently block. Without that possibility of loss of priority, it is not actually competition, it is rather theft of services by the customer.
My prescription at the moment is:
Keep the blocksize at the 0.7 level, but move to 0.8 in order to remove the problematic BDB code.
Distribute the configuration recommendations that make the 0.7 & 0.8 outputs remain compatible.
Segregate the SD transactions into two categories of blocks, those that exclude them, and blocks that are only them, when it does not violate any other rule or custom.
That is all. Miigwech bizindawiyeg.
Topic: Replace [BTC] 25 per block, dust of time (Read 889 times)
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