Re: [Bitcoin-development] Incorporating block validation rule modifications into the block chain

[Stephen Pair <stephen@bitpay.com>]

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On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 7:28 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com> wrote:

> <bunch of stuff>
>

I understand your arguments, but don't agree with many of your conclusions.

The requirement for everyone to hear the history doesn't get talked
> about much


One of the beauties of bitcoin is that the miners have a very strong
incentive to distribute as widely and as quickly as possible the blocks
they find...they also have a very strong incentive to hear about the blocks
that others find.  There will not be an issue with blocks being "jealously
guarded"...what miners will want is a good feed of transactions that they
want to mine.  They will be willing to pay for those feeds (either by
sharing the proceeds with highly connected "relay" nodes or by operating
highly connected nodes themselves).  Because miners will only want to pay
to get a feed of profitable transactions, they will not pay to receive
transactions whose miner fee does not cover the "relay" fee (by which I
mean the fee or cost associated with the bandwidth and validation that a
transaction requires) with some amount of profit.  This means that the
relay node will not fetch and propagate those transactions whose fee is too
small (unless there was some other fee structure outside the miners fee).

These are relatively easy businesses to operate...which means there will be
a lot of them and they'll compete on fees (with wallets automatically
discovering the cheapest of the services).  If the businesses of relaying
and mining ever became too centralized, other businesses with a vested
interest in the success of bitcoin would take the necessary steps to ensure
there remained adequate decentralization.

It's important to remember that the centralization that currently exists in
the fiat currency world benefits one set of businesses to the detriment of
many others.  Having a functioning and trustworthy payment system benefits
far more people and businesses than a centralized system would.

It is good to be wary of these potential issues, but I don't see how the
economics are likely to yield the outcome you fear.  And, really, there's
not a lot that can be done to prevent economics from dictating the ultimate
outcome.  In fact, what I write above is not so much about what I think
*should* be built, it's more about what I *predict* will be built.

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