For what it is worth, I question whether this is a problem. Or, I guess I question whether the best solution to it isn't for people to start including more transaction fees. In fact, I'm not entirely sure that this problem doesn't actually *encourage* people to that solution, which would be very good if true.
I would be more comfortable if the reward for mining were more commensurate with the value it provides. Ultimately, of course, that means that each transaction fee would have to be more of a proportion of the value *to the spender* of that transaction being included in the blockchain. (Aside: in order to convey to outsiders that miners are providing a useful service rather than gaining undeserved reward for wasting electricity, I refer to them as "distributed transaction verification servers" rather than "miners" whenever possible.) I'm pretty sure that — assuming there isn't some Bitcoin-killing disaster — transaction fees will eventually rise, but sooner might be better, especially with the first coinbase-halving looming. Perhaps people will be motivated to include transaction fees if they know that some miners don't bother to validate their transactions and others do. They may feel motivated to reward the miners that are serving them and punish the ones that are not. (Note: this wouldn't be a valid strategy on their part from a strictly game-theoretic perspective, but if they act on those motivations, then I don't care if it was rational or not.) Also, they may decide that they want to counteract the added delay which those no-transactions miners are adding to *all* transactions (with or without fee), by putting a fee on their transactions in order to make them take less long when they are processed by a miner which does process (some) transactions. Already this visualization, which I typically glance at a few times a day, usually shows a good separation with fee-included transactions sometimes doing much better than (some) free transactions: http://bitcoinstats.org/ However, this graph shows that the aggregate reward to the miners for processing transaction is minimal: http://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees?timespan=60days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= You can see from the first visualization (assuming it is showing the typical pattern that I've seen) how you risk greater delay by sending your transaction without fees. The no-transactions miners push *all* transactions, fee or no-fee to the right. This may incentivize more people to change their transactions from red diamonds into blue circles, in order to move their transactions further to the left, even though the no-transactions miners are not currently discriminating among the two types. Therefore, the presence of those miners may help push the aggregate fees in that latter graph up, which is something I would very much like to see. Regards, Zooko ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
