> On 31 May 2015, at 13:52, Gavin Andresen <gavinandre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 9:31 PM, Chun Wang <1240...@gmail.com 
> <mailto:1240...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> If someone propagate a 20MB block, it will take at best 6 seconds for
> us to receive to verify it at current configuration, result of one
> percent orphan rate increase.
> 
> That orphan rate increase will go to whoever is producing the 20MB blocks, 
> NOT you.

There's an interesting incentives question if the mining fees ever become large 
enough to be interesting. Given two potential blocks on which to build then for 
the best interests of the system we'd want miners to select the block that 
confirmed the largest number of transactions since that puts less pressure on 
the network later. This is at odds with the incentives for our would-be block 
maker though because the incentive for mining would be to use whichever block 
left the largest potential fees available; that's generally going to be the 
smaller of the two.

This, of course, only gets worse as the block reward reduces and fees become 
the dominant way for miners to be paid (and my hypothesis that eventually this 
could lead to miners trying to deliberately orphan earlier blocks to "steal" 
fees because the fixed block reward is no longer the dominant part of their 
income).

When coupled with the block propagation delay problem increasing the risk of 
orphan races I'm pretty sure that this actually leads to miners having an 
incentive to continually mine smaller blocks, and that's aside from the 
question of whether smaller blocks will push up fees (which also benefits 
miners). 


Cheers,
Dave


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Bitcoin-development mailing list
Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development

Reply via email to