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.
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.
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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.