📅 Original date posted:2015-06-14 📝 Original message:While ...

2023-06-07T15:37:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…u0g2
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📅 Original date posted:2015-06-14
📝 Original message:While this idea is theoretically interesting because it involves many stakeholders, rather than just miners, I think in practice this would not work very well. Users don't want to worry about this kind of technicality, they just want to be able to make a transaction and have it be processed.

In addition, while this gives stakeholders some weight with the fees they supply, these fees are marginal compared to the block size subsidy. If this proposal were actually implemented, I think miners would vote for whatever they think is best, and users would not contradict them with their votes to ensure a fast confirmation time. Users are incentivized to be in agreement with miners because the miners provide them with the confirmations they need, but fees do not provide a great incentive for miners to be in agreement with users, and likely won't for some time.

Best,
Stephen

> On Jun 12, 2015, at 2:11 PM, Peter Todd <pete at petertodd.org> wrote:
>
> Jeff Garzik recently proposed that the upper blocksize limit be removed
> entirely, with a "soft" limit being enforced via miner vote, recorded by
> hashing power.
>
> This mechanism within the protocol for users to have any influence over
> the miner vote. We can add that back by providing a way for transactions
> themselves to set a flag determining whether or not they can be included
> in a block casting a specific vote.
>
> We can simplify Garzik's vote to say that one of the nVersion bits
> either votes for the blocksize to be increased, or decreased, by some
> fixed ratio (e.g 2x or 1/2x) the next interval. Then we can use a
> nVersion bit in transactions themselves, also voting for an increase or
> decrease. Transactions may only be included in blocks with an
> indentical vote, thus providing miners with a monetary incentive via
> fees to vote according to user wishes.
>
> Of course, to cast a "don't care" vote we can either define an
> additional bit, or sign the transaction with both versions. Equally we
> can even have different versions with different fees, broadcast via a
> mechanism such as replace-by-fee.
>
>
> See also John Dillon's proposal for proof-of-stake blocksize voting:
>
> https://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg02323.html
>
> --
> 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
> 0000000000000000127ab1d576dc851f374424f1269c4700ccaba2c42d97e778
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Bitcoin-development at lists.sourceforge.net
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📅 Original date posted:2015-05-16 📝 Original ...

2023-06-07T15:33:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…4w2r
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📅 Original date posted:2015-05-16
📝 Original message:Comments in line:

> On May 8, 2015, at 11:08 PM, Peter Todd <pete at petertodd.org> wrote:
>
> Makes it trivial to find miners and DoS attack them - a huge risk to the
> network as a whole, as well as the miners.
>
> Right now pools already get DoSed all the time through their work
> submission systems; getting DoS attacked via their nodes as well would
> be a disaster.

It seems that using a -miner flag to follow rules about smaller blocks would only reveal miner nodes if one sent the node a solved block that that was valid in every way except the block size. While not impossible, I wouldn't call this trivial, as it still requires wasting an entire block's worth of energy.

>> When in "miner mode", the client would reject 4MB blocks and wouldn't build
>> on them. The reference client might even track the miner and the non-miner
>> chain tip.
>>
>> Miners would refuse to build on 5MB blocks, but merchants and general users
>> would accept them.
>
> That'd be an excellent way to double-spend merchants, significantly
> increasing the chance that the double-spend would succeed as you only
> have to get sufficient hashing power to get the lucky blocks; you don't
> need enough hashing power to *also* ensure those blocks don't become the
> longest chain, removing the need to sybil attack your target.
>

I think this could be mitigated by counting confirmations differently. We should think of confirmations as only coming from blocks following the miners' more strict rule set. So if a merchant were to see payment for the first time in a block that met their own size restrictions but not the miners', then they would simply count it as unconfirmed.

If they get deep enough in the chain, though, the client should probably count them as being confirmed anyway, even if they don't meet the client nodes' expectation of the miners' block size limit. This happening probably just means that the client has not updated their software (or -minermaxblocksize configuration, depending on how it is implemented) in a long time.

I actually like Tier's suggestion quite a bit. I think we could have the default client limit set to some higher number, and have miners agree out of band on the latest block size limit. Or maybe even build in a way to vote into the blockchain.

Best,
Stephen

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