Bitcoin consensus rules that are bound to change

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Avatar for lubokkanev
4 years ago

There are consensus rules that are bound to change with the increased adoption and software improvement of Bitcoin. Those include the block size, minimum tx fee, and ancestor limit. For example, if the price gets to $20k, 1sat/byte fees will mean about 5 cent fees for the most basic transactions. That can easily get to dollars, for multi-output transactions, not to mention making Memo unusable. We will need to make it easy to change the default minimum fee. A good mechanism for such changes is needed.

My proposal is to make those, instead of being constants in the code, be part of the chain - like what block difficulty is.

For example, make the block-size a moving average of the past X blocks and the next block can be maximum 10% bigger from that average. Miners mined transactions with longer ancestor chains? - increase the default value. Miners accepted 0.1sat/byte transactions? - lower the default minimum fee.

This way there's no central planning, miners are still free to make adjustments, wallets know the boundaries of those possible adjustments and can let the user be sure of the effects of their actions (like choosing lower than the 1sat/byte fee may now be a good idea, if the default has lowered).

This, bundled with Avalanche, where nodes have synced mempools, could make the system much more robust!

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Comments

Min tx fee is not a consensus rule actually, but up to miner policy. Ancestor limit is mostly policy as well if I recall correctly. You should learn the difference between consensus and policy and why certain things like min fee has to be policy.

$ 0.10
4 years ago

I'm kinda proposing to make them 'loose' consensus rules. Once Avalanche is activated that's probably what will happen, right?

The Avalanche transactions always get to be included in the next block, which implies a certain min fee and max ancestor length, which can change each block.

$ 0.00
4 years ago

For example, if the price gets to $20k, 1sat/byte fees will mean about 5 cent fees for the most basic transactions.

Not only this, but also the dust limit (546 satoshis) at $20k means that you can't send anything smaller than 10 cents! That would be disastrous for our affiliate program.

$ 0.20
4 years ago

the dust limit (546 satoshis) at $20k means that you can't send anything smaller than 10 cents! That would be disastrous for our affiliate program.

I'm actually looking forward to having this problem. A so-called "nice problem to have".

$ 0.00
4 years ago

Yeah, I mean in order to be world money we need a price of about $3m per coin, so we'll have these problems anyway

$ 0.00
4 years ago