Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Why the economical part isn't mentioned on the whitepaper?
by
squatter
on 25/07/2019, 22:06:16 UTC
Error 3: Transaction fees alone will not be able to maintain Bitcoin insane energy waste.
http://randomwalker.info/publications/mining_CCS.pdf

Quote
On the Instability of Bitcoin Without the Block Reward

Bitcoin  provides  two  incentives  for  miners:  block  rewards and transaction fees.
The former accounts for the vast majority of miner revenues at the beginning of the system, but it is expected to transition to the latter as the block rewards dwindle.   There  has  been  an  implicit  belief  that  whether miners  are  paid  by  block  rewards  or  transaction  fees  does not affect the security of the block chain. We show that this is not the case.  Our key insight is that with only transaction fees, the variance of the block reward is very high due to the exponentially distributed block arrival time,  and  it  becomes  attractive  to  fork  a “wealthy” block to “steal” the  rewards  therein.   We  show  that  this  results in an equilibrium with undesirable properties for Bitcoin’s security and performance, and even non-equilibria in some circumstances.

This sort of speculation about block reward variance is premature. It seems like the authors are drastically overstating the effect of block times on block rewards. They don't account for the fact that the Poisson distribution evens out over time, just like the average 10 minute target block time. They are cherry picking to suggest that empty blocks over the short run aren't mitigated by full blocks with high fees on the other side of the spectrum. I also question their assumptions about the success of forks that are incompatible with full nodes. I think history has shown that miners are far less powerful vis-a-vis consensus change than people once assumed.