Hi Giuseppe, One side-effect this has is that until enough fees accumulate in the mempool to satisfy min_fees, the rational behaviour for miners would be to try and fork the chain tip, competing for the fees in the latest block (+whatever got into the mempool in the meanwhile and can fit in). This could lead to increased reorgs/orphan rates and chain instability. It could also lead to miners preferring to set their low_fee to zero, to avoid other miners from forking their blocks off.
I'm also not sure that this would actually change much. If humanity is willing to spend X BTC/day on mining fees, it doesn't really matter if it's spread out through fewer or more blocks. shesek On Wed, Mar 1, 2023 at 10:25 PM Giuseppe B via bitcoin-dev < bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > Hello everyone, > > I'm relatively new here so what I'm proposing could have already been > discussed, or may be flawed or inapplicable. I apologize for that. > > I was picturing a situation where block rewards are almost zero, and the > base layer is mainly used as a settlement layer for relatively few large > transactions, since the majority of smaller ones goes through LN. > > In such a case it may very well be that even if transaction amounts are > very consistent, transaction fees end up being very small since there is > enough space for everyone in a block. Users wouldn't mind paying higher > fees as they know that that would increase the network security, however > nobody wants to be the only one doing that. Miners would of course like > being paid more. So everyone involved would prefer higher fees but they > just stay low because that's the only rational individual choice. > > Therefore I was imagining the introduction of a new protocol rule, > min_fees, that would work like this: > - the miner that gets to mine a block appends a min_fee field to the > block, specifying the minimum fees that need to be contained in the > following block in order for it to be valid. > - one can also mine an empty block and reset the min_fee, to avoid the > chain getting stuck. > > min_fees could either represent the total fees of the following block, or > the minimal fee for each single transaction, as a percentage of the value > transacted. Both seem to have some merits and some potential drawbacks. Of > course min_fees=0 would correspond to the current situation. > > It looks to me that this could have the potential to bring the equilibrium > closer to a socially optimal one (as opposed to individually optimal), and > to benefit the network security in the long term. Of course it's just a > rough sketch and it would deserve a much deeper analysis. I was just > interested in knowing if you think that the principle has some merit or if > it's not even worth discussing it for some reason that I'm not considering. > > Cheers, > > Giuseppe. > > _______________________________________________ > bitcoin-dev mailing list > bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev >
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