Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: I know this has been brought up before, but confirmation times are getting weird
by
Peter Todd
on 25/11/2013, 23:35:16 UTC
What I'm wondering is where is MisterBigg?  He was the dude saying if we removed the blocksize limit then miners would be stuffing everything into one block, even things paying 1 satoshi.  I think that idea has been thoroughly debunked, particularly recently - his school of thought cannot explain the current phenomenon, and we're nowhere near the 1MB limit.  More evidence we should just get rid of it.

AFAIK I'm the one who pointed out that incentive first; MisterBigg either independently realized the same thing or was repeating me.

Either way, I did my analysis more carefully here and found that the incentive to stuff blocks full of garbage was even stronger than I originally thought. However that incentive only is true under specific circumstances that are not present in the current Bitcoin system, but will be in the future. Specifically doing that decreases the number of blocks you find per unit hashing power, but it decreases that number even more for your competitors - right now blocks are themselves worth a lot of money so there's no reason to use that strategy, but in the future when mining income is mainly from transaction fees the strategy appears to make sense.

tl;dr: the idea is anything but debunked, it's just not yet relevant.