Some miners at OCEAN have began making use of the Coin Age Precedence algorithm throughout block template development utilizing DATUM. Initially, Bitcoin Core initially chosen transactions to incorporate in blocks based mostly on what they’d seen first of their mempool. This logic was finally changed by prioritizing older cash, i.e. that had been sitting round unspent longer, over different cash. This was finally solely utilized to a small portion of the blockspace, after which finally carried out away with solely across the time of Segwit. It’s nonetheless maintained in Bitcoin Knots.
I can solely speculate as to the motives of the miners doing this, however given OCEAN’s rhetoric I can guess that it has one thing to do with prioritizing “monetary” transactions over others. Even when not, even whether it is purely to assist small worth UTXO homeowners, it’s nonetheless each bit as irrational.
You’ll be able to partition blockspace as a miner nonetheless you need, and prioritize ordering of transactions nonetheless you want inside these partitions, nevertheless it doesn’t change the truth that blockspace is a fungible good being valued on an open market. If standards apart from the feerate are used to resolve which transactions to incorporate, you’ll go away cash on the desk. The one state of affairs the place that may not be true is one the place these standards had been 1:1 equivalent to deciding based mostly on feerate, which might be a meaningless standards.
Making a subsection of blockspace chosen for by different standards in the end accomplishes two issues: 1) leaving cash on the desk as a miner, as definitionally any significant non-feerate standards ends in gathering much less charges, and a couple of) create a bucket of blockspace submitted to aggressive “payment” pressures in keeping with no matter completely different standards is used, with none of that stress creating direct income will increase for miners utilizing this new standards.
The brand new subsection of blockspace doesn’t in the end scale back payment stress, it merely leaves them making much less cash and customers profiting from this new transaction choice standards subjected to completely different aggressive pressures miners don’t immediately profit from.
You’ll be able to’t cover from the fact that blockspace is a fungible good priced on the open market. You’ll be able to settle for that, or you possibly can lose cash. The one various is to futilely attempt to censor courses of transactions you don’t like, and should you occur to succeed, you destroy a core property of Bitcoin within the course of.
Mining staying decentralized, broadly distributed with many small operators, is crucial for Bitcoin’s censorship resistance. It’s a disgrace to see indicators like this of such smaller miners being economically irrational, on condition that it has enormous implications for his or her success long run.
This text is a Take. Opinions expressed are solely the writer’s and don’t essentially mirror these of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Journal.
