anyone running the bitcoin-qt client is a node. (users)
when doing transactions the fee goes to miners.
the miners or when solving a block get a standard reward (currently 25btc) and the total of the transaction fee's of all transactions in that block.
if your in a mining pool that reward and fee total gets spread out with all the miners in the pool shared fairly depending on the hashrate(speed) of the miner.
so if i understand corectly the reward and all the fees since the last block go to the lucky one finding the block?
is there a specific reason for that?
It provides an incentive so people will run the mining process.
it just seems a weird way to design it, maybe even unfair and dangerous.
Unfair? Dangerous? I don't understand.
why isn`t the fee devided amongst the miners that actually confirmed the transaction?
This is what mining pools do. The pool builds the blocks, then they send the blocks out to all the participating miners so the miners can do the hashing. Once a miner succeeds in finding the appropriate hash, the mining pool gets paid. The mining pool then divides the block reward among all the miners that participate in the pool.
i`m asking because i was thinking about that the other day. i dont know if it is common practice for pools to devide the fees to the users, or that the pools admin keeps that revenue.
That depends on the pool. Some pools keep the fees, some divide the fees among the participating miners. Each pool can set their own rules, and miners can choose which pool they want to participate in.
anyway, if the fee is directly given to the miners who procesed the transaction wouldn`t that be a good incentive to get more people to solomine.
How would you make this work? Right now, the creator of the block gets to choose where the block reward gets paid. How would the creator of the block know which addresses to assign the reward to?
if you are still running some older hardware that could still be some nice change, even if you dont find a block. and if your lucky and you do youre gonna be very happy;)
I don't think I understand what you mean by "process the transaction". Other than building a block and solving it, what other processing are you talking about?
i think pools at the moment are just to big. its no problem as long as the owners only have the best intentions, but those pools still are a big target and much easier to compromise then a army of much smaller pools and solominers. if some entity in the future would want to compromise the network, taking controll of a pool as big as btcguild or something would be enough to cause massive disruption. and compromising pool owners is something terrorists or the cia or any organisations like that have absolutly no problem with.
So, start your own pool. Convince others to join your pool. Give them a good incentive. The more people who do the same, the more pools there will be, and the smaller that the "big pools" will be.
the reason everybody joins a pool now is beacause if you solo mine for five years and you dont find a block you wont get anything for your efforts. and the bigger pools tend to have bigger returns, so the big ones get bigger, and the small ones get smaller.
Why would the bigger pools get bigger returns? They might have less variability, but the returns shouldn't be bigger (unless the small pool operator is keeping too much of the reward for themselves).
maybe i`m missing something, i never really looked into this before , but to mee that seems to be a security flaw thats easily corrected.
Easily? Have you looked at the protocol? How exactly would you implement what youa re suggesting. Just because it's
easy to say that you want miners to get paid without solving a block doesn't mean that it's actually
easy to do.
