[Bitcoin-development] Proposal: SPV Fee Discovery mechanism

[Nathan Wilcox <nathan@leastauthority.com>]

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[I'm currently wading through bitcoin-development. I'm still about a month
behind, so I apologize in advance for any noisy redundancy in this post.]

While reading about blocksize, I've just finished Mike Hearn's blog post
describing expected systemic behavior as actual blocks approach the current
limit (with or without non-protocol-changing implementation improvements):

https://medium.com/@octskyward/crash-landing-f5cc19908e32


One detail Mike uses to argue against the "fee's will save us" line of
reasoning is that wallets have no good way to learn fee information.

So, here's a proposal to fix that: put fee and (and perhaps block size,
UTXO, etc...) statistics into the locally-verifiable data available to SPV
clients (ie: block headers).


It's easy to imagine a hard fork that places details like per-block total
fees, transaction count, fee variance, UTXO delta, etc... in a each block
header. This would allow SPV clients to rely on this data with the same
PoW-backed assurances as all other header data.

This mechanism seems valuable regardless of the outcome of blocksize
debate. So long as fees are interesting or important, SPV clients should
know about them. (Same for other stats such as UTXO count.)

Upgrading the protocol without a hard-fork may be possible and is left as
an exercise for the reader. ;-)

-- 
Nathan Wilcox
Least Authoritarian

email: nathan@leastauthority.com
twitter: @least_nathan
PGP: 11169993 / AAAC 5675 E3F7 514C 67ED  E9C9 3BFE 5263 1116 9993

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