Re: How does block size harm decentralization?

Quote from: franky1 on February 10, 2019, 08:33:02 AM

Quote from: squatter on February 10, 2019, 08:20:31 AM

If you keep giving users more block space for free, they'll keep taking it, regardless of the long term costs. Raising the ceiling higher and higher means there is no mechanism to enforce fees. How's that going to work a few halvings down the road when block rewards are amounting to little more than 1.5 BTC? "Free transactions for all" sounds like a nice socialist paradise, but miners aren't in this for charity.

Every one of us has incentive to avoid paying fees. So, why do people like me still oppose bigger blocks and prefer the settlement layer approach? Because I also hold bitcoins, and I know that the block size limit is integral to guaranteeing the security of Bitcoin and thus the value of my coins.

ever thought of actually having a fee mechanism
a fee priority formulae like what was available for several years before core moved it.

Fee priority didn't solve this problem. It was actually just a way for users to pay less fees!

It was miners who took it upon themselves to remove transaction priority because it was node policy, not part of the protocol. Transaction priority was losing them revenue so they stopped enforcing it. It made no sense to keep using priority in Core's fee calculations if no miners were actually using it. There's some good discussion of the issue here, including this bit:

Quote

After blocks started getting full, many miners, out of the interest of getting as much income as possible, chose to stop reserving this space for priority. There is more money to be made by choosing a few hundred transactions that paid more fees than it was to choose a few hundred transactions that didn't but had priority. Since no one miner was actually using priority, Bitcoin Core removed priority from its fee and confirmation estimations so that the given values would be more realistic and the code would be simpler.

The following pull requests and the issues linked within them contain some of the discussions that the Core devs had when removing priority: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/9602, https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/7022, https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/7008.