Quote from: R2D221 on February 10, 2015, 10:08:32 PM

This can happen anytime now. Why would it be any different after the fork?

(Numbers made up.)

After the fork, the government could regularly post blocks with a million transactions in it. If it happened regularly enough, people would lower their transaction fees, and some profit-seeking miners would leave.

They can try to do the same thing before the fork, but each time they are limited to posting blocks with only 100 transactions in it. There's still scarcity, and fewer miners will leave.

Granted, scarcity is not driving mining at this time. But transaction fees were "supposed to" take over mining bounties (which I think is bad design, see below).

Quote from: R2D221 on February 10, 2015, 10:08:32 PM

I still don't get how you go from Miners are mining at a loss to This is proof of stake.

There are four groups of people (a) stakeholders, (b) saboteurs, (c) transactors, and (d) miners. With PoW, stakeholders want to protect their coins from saboteurs, and for some reason transactors pay miners to do so. That's pretty convoluted! Transactors and miners would be just as happy destroying the blockchain, if it enriched them somehow. (We've seen attack vectors along these lines.)

However, if block size is increased, there's really no reason why most miners won't include as many transactions as possible, since it doesn't really cost them anything. Transactors will no longer be required to pay to have their transactions included in the blockchain, and eventually profit-seeking miners will leave. Stakeholders will still need to protect their coins from saboteurs. Suddenly, stakeholders will either have to mine themselves, or send bitcoin to themselves with large fees, in order to keep miners in the game (which is inefficient, because sometimes the fees will go to saboteurs). In this scenario, we've realigned the costs of maintaining the integrity of the blockchain: the transaction fees have dropped, and stakeholders are paying to protect their coins. These are the same incentives as PoS.

However, this is a really inefficient way of determining which ledger is correct. There are at least two ways to do so:

(1) You can ask the stakeholders and the saboteurs to fight it out. The last one standing decides which ledger is correct. This is PoW.

(2) You can just ask the stakeholders which ledger is correct. This is PoS.

Thoughts?

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