[bitcoin-dev] BIP Idea: Marginal Pricing

Sat Dec 2 03:55:22 UTC 2017

I also am for the idea of removing blocksize limits if it is workable, however, would propose an alternative method for selecting transactions to be included in a block.

Some of the issues discussed in other replies to this thread are valid.

Alternative proposal:

Provide each transaction with a transaction weight, being a function of the fee paid (on a curve), and the time waiting in the pool (also on a curve) out to n days (n=30 ?), the transaction weight serving as the likelihood of a transaction being included in the current block, and then use an uncapped block size. The curve allows that the higher a fee allows a transaction to be much more likely to be included, the highest fee gets 100%, and, transactions at the n days limit get near 100%. Would need protocol enforcement since, as I understand, no miner would mine more transactions than are necessary to meet min blocksize. Other than that it should function fine. Non-urgent transactions pay a lower fee, people choose fees from fee recommendation based on how many days before a tx begins confirmation, all transactions are eventually included in the blockchain.

Regards,

Damian Williamson

________________________________
From: bitcoin-dev-bounces at lists.linuxfoundation.org <bitcoin-dev-bounces at lists.linuxfoundation.org> on behalf of William Morriss via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org>
Sent: Thursday, 30 November 2017 11:47:43 AM
To: bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org
Subject: [bitcoin-dev] BIP Idea: Marginal Pricing

Comrades,

Long term, tx fees must support hash power by themselves. The following is an economic approach to maximize total fee collection, and therefore hashpower.

Goals
Maximize total transaction fees
Reduce pending transaction time
Reduce individual transaction fees

Challenges
Validators must agree on the maximum block size, else miners can cheat and include extra transactions.
Allowing too many transactions per block will increase the cost of the mining without collecting much income for the network.

Problem
In the transaction market, users are the demand curve, because they will transact less when fees are higher, and prefer altcoins. The block size is the supply curve, because it represents miners' willingness to accept transactions.
Currently, the supply curve is inelastic:
[cid:ii_jalpxsnl1_1600a3d9def1eaff]
Increasing the block size will not affect the inelasticity for any fixed block size. The downsides of a fixed block size limit are well-known:
- Unpredictable transaction settlement time
- Variable transaction fees depending on network congestion
- Frequent overpay

Proposal
1. Miners implicitly choose the market sat/byte rate with the cheapest-fee transaction included in their block. Excess transaction fees are refunded to the inputs.
2. Remove the block size limit, which is no longer necessary.

Benefits
- Dynamic block size limit regulated by profit motive
- Transaction fees maximized for every block
- No overpay; all fees are fair
[cid:ii_jalqir4g2_1600a4c89811347a]
Miners individually will make decisions to maximize their block-reward profit.
Miners are incentivized to ignore low-fee transactions because they would shave the profits of their other transactions and increase their hash time.
Users and services are free to bid higher transaction fees in order to reach the next block, since their excess bid will be refunded.

The block size limit was added as a spam-prevention measure, but in order for an attacker to spam the network with low-fee transactions, they would have to offset the marginal cost of reducing the price with their own transaction fees. Anti-spam is thus built into the marginal system without the need for an explicit limit.

Rarely, sections of the backlog would become large enough to be profitable. This means every so many blocks, lower-fee transactions would be included en masse after having been ignored long enough. Low-fee transactions thus gain a liveness property not previously enjoyed: low-fee transactions will eventually confirm. Miners targeting these transactions would be at a noteworthy disadvantage because they would be hashing a larger block. I predict that this scheme would result in two markets: a backlog market and a real-time market. Users targeting the backlog market would match the price of the largest backlog section in order to be included in the next backlog block.

Examples

Scenario 1
Sat/byte        Bytes   Reward
400     500000  200000000
300     700000  210000000
200     1000000 200000000
100     1500000 150000000
50      5000000 250000000
20      10000000        200000000
A miner would create a 5MB block and receive 0.25 BTC

Scenario 2
Sat/byte        Bytes   Reward
400     600000  240000000
300     700000  210000000
200     1000000 200000000
100     1800000 180000000
50      4000000 200000000
20      10000000        200000000
A miner would create a 600KB block and receive 0.24 BTC

Thanks,
William Morriss
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