So more analysis is still in order, but overall, I don't think these dynamics encourage the formation of big miners.
This is encouraging... it sounded yesterday as if you had almost regretted making this thread and were about to pull your own support from the proposal because of this and now it looks like it might be less of a problem than initially thought.
I'm having some trouble following the logic of the objection. I dug it from upthread:
That said, a problem with any kind of rollover fee is that it assumes that moving fees to future blocks is also moving fees to different nodes.
Put differently; centralizing nodes is a way of avoiding the penalties you're trying to introduce with this protocol.
Put differently again; Paying fees over consecutive blocks gives a competitive advantage to larger mining entities when making larger blocks.
Put triply differently; A node that can reliably get another block within X blocks is less penalized than a node that cannot, where "X" is the number of blocks that the rollover fee is given.
So if the goal is to avoid centralization, then the protocol does the opposite of the intention. If the goal is to make Bitcoin fail-safe, I'm not convinced that Bitcoin isn't already. When blocks fill, we will see higher transaction fees, potentially lengthier times before a transaction is included in a block, and as a result more 3rd party transactions.
TLDR: How does a fee over "X" blocks not incentivize a centralization of nodes?
firstly, what we're talking about here is not, as DumbFruit generalizes, a "rollover fee". It's a disporportional penalty on mining large blocks. I'm not sure wether this changes his argument or its validity.
For thinking about this I'm using the following hypothetical mining landscape: 25%, 25%, 5 x 10%.
Now I think there are at least 2 interesting questions we can ask:
- Do the 2 25% miners (or 2 of the 10% miners) have a higher-than-in-current-system incentive to collude?
- Is Menis proposal making it easier for the 2 25% miners to try to drive out small (as in bandwidth) miners by mining disproportionally large blocks?
Both questions boil down to
- Does Menis proposal encourage centralization more than the current system?
Before I go on... am I asking the correct questions?