[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):
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.comtwitter: @least_nathan
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