Re: [bitcoin-dev] Răspuns: Personal opinion on the fee market from a worried local trader

[Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org>]

btw the fact that mining is (or can be) anonymous also makes oligopoly
or cartel behaviour likely unstable.  Miners can break ranks and
process transactions others wish to block, or with lower fees than a
cartel would like to charge, without detection.

Anonymous mining is a feature and helps ensure policy neutrality.

This is all overlaid by the 51% attack - if a coherent cartel arose
that could maintain 51% and had enough mutual self-interest to make
that stable, they could attack miners bypassing their cartel policies,
by orphaning their blocks.  This is partly why mining decentralisation
is important.  Also that is an overt act which is very detectable and
could lead to technical counter-measures by the users, who are in
ultimately in control of the protocol.  So there is some game theory
suggesting it would be inadvisable for miners to be overt in cartel
attacks.  Non overt attacks cant prevent anonymous under cutting of
cartel desired fee minimums.

Adam

On 29 July 2015 at 21:00, Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org> wrote:
> On 29 July 2015 at 20:41, Ryan Butler via bitcoin-dev
> <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>> Does an unlimited blocksize imply the lack of a fee market?  Isn't every
>> miner able to set their minimum accepted fee or transaction acceptance
>> algorithm?
>
> The assumption is that wont work because any miner can break ranks and
> do so profitably, so to expect otherwise is to expect oligopoly
> behaviour which is the sort of antithesis of a decentralised mining
> system.  It's in fact a similar argument as to why decentralisation of
> mining provides policy neutrality: some miner somewhere with some
> hashrate will process your transaction even if some other miners are
> by policy deciding not to mine it.  It is also similar reason why free
> transactions are processed today - policies vary and this is good for
> ensuring many types of transaction get processed.
>
> Adam