Hi shesek, Minimum fees may not be the right mechanism. However I disagree with the general idea that "if it's optimal for society to do X then they'll do X". There's plenty of examples where people fail to coordinate in the absence of a suitable framework, see the "free rider" problem with public goods or even the simple prisoner's dilemma.
On Thu, Mar 2, 2023, 1:39 AM Nadav Ivgi <na...@shesek.info> wrote: > 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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