I know miners can do that, but it is not meant to primarily stop a malicious miner, but just to keep the blocks full. I think it is good to convince greedy miners not to mine empty blocks for a speed advantage.



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-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Encouraging good miners
Local Time: March 28, 2017 12:23 AM
UTC Time: March 27, 2017 4:23 PM
From: patrick.mccorry@newcastle.ac.uk
To: Btc Ideas <btcideas@protonmail.com>, Bitcoin Protocol Discussion <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>


Miner's can include transactions that send themselves bitcoins. Number of transactions is not a good measure of utility. 


From: bitcoin-dev-bounces@lists.linuxfoundation.org <bitcoin-dev-bounces@lists.linuxfoundation.org> on behalf of Btc Ideas via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>
Sent: 27 March 2017 17:12:19
To: bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
Subject: [bitcoin-dev] Encouraging good miners
 
Add a preference for mined blocks to be the one with more transactions. This comes into play when 2 blocks of the same height are found. The first good block mined would be orphaned if it had less transactions than another. Optionally, have this rule apply to the current block and the previous one.

This increases incentive for full blocks because a miner thinking the faster propagation of a smaller block will win him the reward, but that would no longer be a good assumption.

I read some miners could attack a chain by mining small or empty blocks. This makes that a little more difficult, but they can still attack the chain many ways.


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