Quote from: creighto on November 23, 2010, 04:38:29 AM

Quote from: asdf on November 23, 2010, 02:42:42 AM

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.

Not surely, but maybe. I don't think so because of the preservation motive is nearly as strong as the profit motive, and because there will still be some who can generate at a negligible additional cost, so there is no point at which generation is unprofitable. The confluence of these motivations will ultimately create a self regulating market with a fairly stable difficulty level. The real question then becomes, is that difficulty level secure enough to defend against a brute force attack? That is a question that may never be answerable.

I don't disagree that there is a preservation motive to rival the profit motive, but I think that the profit motive is far more prevalent. Only some want to preserve the integrity of the chain, but everyone wants to make profit. As it is, contributing as an honest node is more profitable than attacking the network, but remove the incentive of fees and profit motivated generators become profit motivated attackers. Will the network be strong enough...

Quote from: creighto on November 23, 2010, 04:38:29 AM

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

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.

I was still considering it, myself. I think that the priority system does much of what you are trying to do except allow the blocksize to stretch; and I have concerns about the bounds of this rule. Without the priority system, this rule would permit blocksize spamming anytime there were only free transactions in the queue, so there would have to be a minimum allowed average fee, even if that were just .00000001 bitcoins, but then that would prohibit any transactions from being processed at all in the absence of a fee paying transaction even if there was an altruistic generator who won the block. So there would have to additional rules to permit altruistic generators to help clear transaction backlogs, because there is bound to be more free transactions to process than fee paying ones for the foreseeable future.

I offered a plan before you posted yours, and no one commented upon it either.

It would only take one non zero transaction to cut out the freeloading spammers. A generator could inject one himself, which would force clients to match it or come close. Anyway, da2ce7 has me half convinced that miners should be imposing their own rules on the blocks, forming a democracy. It's not like anyone can stop this anyway: A miner is always free to reject any block, for better or worse, for whatever reason it sees fit. So, I guess the conversation about block rules is moot and the question of how to keep fees up is in the hands of the mathematical (game theory) viability of the protocol. Has Satoshi already figured all of this out, I wonder?