Quote from: creighto on November 22, 2010, 05:08:39 AM

Quote from: asdf on November 22, 2010, 04:51:07 AM

Quote from: da2ce7 on November 21, 2010, 11:55:37 PM

In the future we will have generators that will _not generate_ until there is a certain amount of high fee blocks waiting, and then they will automaticity turn on their massive generation capacity and quickly generate the block. This leaves the average difficulty relatively low, and makes a strong incentive to include larger fees. These generators plainly wont include any low fee blocks, low fee blocks will have to wait around for a charity block.

How will the fees build up if the smaller generators are constantly processing them. there isn't going to be a sudden influx of high fee transactions... The large generators will simply be leaving all the profit to competitors. And if the competitors are snapping up any transaction no matter how small the fee, there is little incentive to pay a high fee in the first place.

There is a lot of guessing going in this thread, for we seem to have all fallen victim to the idea that we can guess the nature of a market that doesn't yet exist. As it is now, there is no incentive to pay a transaction fee at all, as the fee structure that currently exists is intended to limit spamming without prohibiting legitimately non-conforming transactions; not offer a profit motive to generators decades away. The fee structure can be altered without much difficulty on a technical level, but the future political issues are as difficult to predict as the market is. Yet many seem to get blinded by the profit motive as the only motive for generation, which can easily be shown to not be the case presently, and I have seen no compelling reason as to why it must become the only reason in the future.

I just feel that any motive other than profit, will not be good enough. I agree that profit is not the ONLY motive for generation as you have pointed out, but other incentives are just too weak and will result in too few generators. The network will be too weak and will surely fail.

How high do you think the difficulty would be now, if there was not the 50BTC incentive to generate? I think it would be < 1000.

No one has commented on my idea of placing a rule on fee distribution on blocks to prevent the acceptance of arbitrarily low fees.

Quote from: asdf on November 22, 2010, 11:51:03 AM

For example, for a block to be valid, no more than half of the transactions in the block can have fees below the average fee for that block. So, if 10 transactions have a fee of 1BTC and 10 more have a fee of 0.5BTC the average is 0.75. Now half the fees are already below this so an additional transaction with a 0.5BTC fee cannot be accepted, but a 0.8BTC fee is okay.

This forces clients to compete with each other for the current block, eliminates the need for a fixed block size (ie. fixes the spam problem) and scales to accommodate any number of transactions. If a spammer sends lots of small-to-zero fee transactions, only some of them, if any, will be accepted, because you can only include max 50% fees which are below the average. To include more smaller fees a generator will have to include more larger fees.

Think about it, clients will compete and a stable market rate for fees will be established. Tiny fees, too far below the market rate will not be accepted soon and fees above the market rate will be guaranteed to be accepted in the current block. It's a simple protocol rule for generators which should be computationally cheap.

Do you guys get this? Perhaps I haven't thought it through enough, it's just a proof of concept; the exact details can be refined. Does anyone have a reason that this can't work? Maybe it's just a really crap idea, but I would appreciate SOME feedback, please.