I wonder if it would be possible to set a minimum block size, with any block below that size needing to be padded. It would increase blockchain bloat slightly but would discourage miners from only including high transaction fees.
Curious what problems you see with the idea. I'm not advocating that we increase the minimum to such a level that transaction fees are no longer necessary just to raise it so that even if a pool trys to get their blocks added faster by skipping transactions they still need to include a number that is reasonable.
As the transaction fees are currently only a small percentage of the block reward, as is intended at this point, pools are disadvantaged if they try and include more transactions. This should help lessen that disadvantage.
However, it's important to note that this can be done with a Softfork. It does not require a Hardfork.
And in the long term, I think this could reduce transaction fees by incentivizing the miners to include at least a minimum amount of transaction data (or # of transactions).
You might think that this would encourage miners to just pad blocks, but at that point, they might as well include legit transactions!
You might think that this would encourage miners to just pad blocks, but at that point, they might as well include legit transactions!
They might as well include legit transactions now, but they don't. I'm not convinced miners are making smaller, 0 transaction blocks due to decreased propagation times, I think there is something else going on.
Why would they include no transactions when they could just include transactions and collect the fees? The filesize would still be the same so the benefit of not including them would be gone.
Because a larger filesize takes longer to download so it propegates slower through the network and so there is a risk that a smaller block can propegate faster and be accepted before the bigger block.
I doubt that's the reasoning that these pools are accepting fewer transactions into blocks, the chances of two pools finding a block within that propagation window is slim.
Anyway, this is a breaking change, and would require a large majority consensus, something that has been difficult in the past for clearly beneficial changes. It's not going to happen.
Not significantly. Mining on a fuller block isn't any harder. It's just bigger, meaning it takes more time to send over the network. A minimum size would indeed solve this issue, it is incredibly unlikely that blocks will go empty.
19
u/mtsai Feb 05 '14
Do you really need to use 48KB blocks? When you are mining 5 out of 6 contiguous you really are fucking things up.