Re: [bitcoin-dev] block size - pay with difficulty

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@gmail.com>]

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It's written as 'a' and/or 'b'.  If you don't have idle hashpower, then
paying with difficulty requires some amount of collusion ('a')

Any miner paying with a higher difficulty either needs idle hashpower, or
self-increase their own difficulty at the possible *opportunity cost* of
losing an entire block's income to another miner who doesn't care about
changing the block size.  The potential loss does not economically
compensate for size increase gains in most cases, when you consider the
variability of blocks (they come in bursts and pauses) and the fee income
that would be associated.

Miners have more to lose paying with diff than they gain -- unless the
entire network colludes out-of-band with ~90% certainty, by collectively
agreeing to increase the block period by collectively agreeing with
pay-with-diff until the globally desired block size is reached.  At that
level of collusion, we can create far more simple schemes to increase block
size.

Pay-with-diff will either not get used, or lead to radical short term block
size (and thus fee) volatility.  It is complex & difficult for all players
to reason, and a Rational game theory choice can be to avoid
paying-for-diff even when the network desperately needs an upgrade.






On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 2:57 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 4:05 AM, Jeff Garzik via bitcoin-dev
> <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> > (b) requiring miners to have idle
> > hashpower on hand to change block size are both unrealistic and
> potentially
>
> I really cannot figure out how you could characterize pay with
> difficty has in any way involving idle hashpower.
>
> Can you walk me through this?
>

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