[Bitcoin-development] Long-term mining incentives

[Aaron Voisine]

> increasing the block size is simply not a solution, it's just kicking
> the can down the road (while reducing the incentives to deploy real
> solutions like payment channels).

Placing hard limits on blocksize is not the right solution. There are still
plenty of options to be explored to increase fees, resulting in users
voluntarily economizing on block space. It's premature to resort to
destroying the reliability of propagated transaction getting into blocks.

Child-pays-for-parent is useful, but requires the recipient to spend inputs
upon receipt, consuming even more block space. Replace-by-fee may also
help, but users won't know the fee they are getting charged until after the
fact, and it will make worse all the problems that tx malleability causes
today.

We have $3billion plus of value in this system to defend. The safe,
conservative course is to increase the block size. Miners already have an
incentive to find ways to encourage higher fees  and we can help them with
standard recommended propagation rules and hybrid priority/fee transaction
selection for blocks that increases confirmation delays for low fee
transactions.

Aaron Voisine
co-founder and CEO
breadwallet.com

On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 5:11 PM, Jorge Timón <jtimon at jtimon.cc> wrote:

> On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 7:29 PM, Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I think long-term the chain will not be secured purely by proof-of-work.
> I
> > think when the Bitcoin network was tiny running solely on people's home
> > computers proof-of-work was the right way to secure the chain, and the
> only
> > fair way to both secure the chain and distribute the coins.
> >
> > See https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/630d4a6c24ac6144482a  for some
> > half-baked thoughts along those lines. I don't think proof-of-work is the
> > last word in distributed consensus (I also don't think any alternatives
> are
> > anywhere near ready to deploy, but they might be in ten years).
>
> Or never, nobody knows at this point.
>
> > I also think it is premature to worry about what will happen in twenty or
> > thirty years when the block subsidy is insignificant. A lot will happen
> in
> > the next twenty years. I could spin a vision of what will secure the
> chain
> > in twenty years, but I'd put a low probability on that vision actually
> > turning out to be correct.
>
> I think is very healthy to worry about that since we know it's
> something that will happen.
> The system should work without subsidies.
>
> > That is why I keep saying Bitcoin is an experiment. But I also believe
> that
> > the incentives are correct, and there are a lot of very motivated, smart,
> > hard-working people who will make it work. When you're talking about
> trying
> > to predict what will happen decades from now, I think that is the best
> you
> > can (honestly) do.
>
> Lightning payment channels may be a new idea, but payment channels are
> not, and nobody is using them.
> They are the best solution to scalability we have right now,
> increasing the block size is simply not a solution, it's just kicking
> the can down the road (while reducing the incentives to deploy real
> solutions like payment channels).
>
> Not worrying about 10 years in the future but asking people to trust
> estimates and speculations about how everything will burn in 2 years
> if we don't act right now seems pretty arbitrary to me.
> One could just as well argue that there's smart hard-working people
> that will solve those problems before they hit us.
>
> It is true that the more distant the future you're trying to predict
> is, the more difficult it is to predict it, but any threshold that
> separates "relevant worries" from "too far in the future to worry
> about it" will always be arbitrary.
> Fortunately we don't need to all share the same time horizon for what
> is worrying and what is not.
> What we need is a clear criterion for what is acceptable for a
> hardfork and a general plan to deploy them:
>
> -Do all the hardfork changes need to be uncontroversial? How do we
> define uncontroversial?
> -Should we maintain and test implementation of hardfork whises that
> seem too small to justify a hardfork on their own (ie time travel fix,
> allowing to sign inputs values...) to also deploy them at the same
> time that other more necessary hardforks?
>
> I agree that hardforks shouldn't be impossible and in that sense I'm
> glad that you started the hardfork debate, but I believe we should be
> focusing on that debate rather than the block size one.
> Once we have a clear criteria, hopefully the block size debate should
> become less noisy and more productive.
>
>
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