Re: [bitcoin-dev] High fees / centralization

[Tom Harding <tomh@thinlink.com>]

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On 3/30/2017 9:14 AM, David Vorick wrote:
> On Mar 30, 2017 12:04 PM, "Tom Harding via bitcoin-dev"
> <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
> <mailto:bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>> wrote:
>
>     Raystonn, 
>
>     Your logic is very hard to dispute. An important special case is
>     small miners.
>
>     Small miners use pools exactly because they want smaller, more
>     frequent payments.
>
>     Rising fees force them to take payments less frequently, and will
>     only tend to make more of them give up.
>
>     With fees rising superlinearly, this centralizing effect is much
>     stronger than the oft-cited worry of small miners joining large
>     pools to decrease orphan rates.
>
>
> Miners get paid on average once every ten minutes. The size of fees
> and the number of fee transactions does not change the payout rate.
>
> Further, we are very far from the point (in my appraisal) where fees
> are high enough to block home users from using the network.
>
> Bitcoin has many high-value use cases such as savings. We should not
> throw away the core innovation of monetary sovereignty in pursuit of
> supporting 0.1% of the world's daily transactions.
>

Owners of small mining rigs get paid by pools, generally using regular
transactions that pay regular fees (p2pool is an exception that pays
directly from coinbase).  The point is the unintended consequences are
directly at odds with one of the justifications offered for small blocks
- miner centralization.

This is a special case.  Raystonn's general point was that high fees
will lead to fewer economic actors overall, and therefore fewer full nodes.


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