"Occasionally" was bad word choice on my part. If "enough" (1 large or many small) miners are willing to fill 20 MB blocks of ~0 fee transactions, then some bitcoin users will send ~0 fee transactions, and some miners that mine for transaction fees will stop mining, which weakens the security of the bitcoin network.

While this has always been a vulnerability, it seems like increasing the block size limit makes this economic sabotage more potent.

There's no need for other miners to follow their example.


Increasing the block size limit reduces transaction fees. Eventually, miners are not mining for transaction fees, but mining as stakeholders to maintain the integrity of the blockchain. Only stakeholders mining doing PoW is like a really inefficient PoS.

They should implement a dynamic block size based on the transactions for the past two weeks similar to how the difficulty is handled. This still allows for smaller nodes to participate in the short-term but also allows the network to scale in the long-term. This also makes it so miners get rewards as long as the number of transactions is increasing since the block size will always be a little bit smaller than the number of transactions.

Why would they be motivated to do so? If there's no motivation, then the rest of the argument does not stand.


Why would these ones stop mining? They would still be profiting. I don't get it.


What's the logic here? If miners are not mining for transactions fees, they are still mining for the subsidy. Either that or it would be a truly altruistic act. And even if it was, they are not proving their stakes at all. They are still proving they have done some work.

VERY good point. Of course only few people decide that. same as exchanges.

the exchanges have behind the SAME shareholders(4-5). The entire BTC is owned by up to 10 people Funny !

Today most (all?) miners accept some zero fee transactions.  Yet fees have not gone down to zero.  They is a balance between cost and convenience.  If there wasn't then ATMs, convenience stores, and overnight mail wouldn't exist as services.

If 100% of miners will accept your txn for $0.05 in fees and 10% will accept your txn for free most rational users will still pick $0.05 in fees on many transactions.  Saving $0.05 usually doesn't make sense and in many cases ends up being the more expensive option (due to volatility risk).  We see this dynamic right now in every block.  There are plenty of "high priority" transactions which include a fee despite it not being required by the full nodes.  Unlike low priority transactions which will not be relayed by full nodes unless they include a fee, high priority transactions will be relayed without a fee so they are guaranteed to end up in the memory pool of miners.  At that point it is only a matter of time before they are included in a block.  The amount of space devoted to high priority transactions is however limited and that means transaction times for unpaid transactions are both long and unpredictable.  For many users the short and predictable confirmation times are worth more than the fee.

If someday 10% of the hashrate decided to include free transactions I think the rest of the miners would love that and probably reduce or eliminate the space they currently give away for free to include more paying transactions.

That's definitely not how it works. You can't just choose which miner will process your transaction.


This is all based on your assumption that miners will start leaving, which simply isn't true. There's no motivation for them to leave.

gosh rude. why not go and ask them? you know exactly where they are. weird to strut around in this non-place

What? A miner that accepts transactions with no fees is not actively blocking transactions with fees. This point makes no sense.


Why are they no longer profitable? Your hypothesis about people not wanting to be with them (which, how will they choose? You CAN'T CHOOSE a miner) is incorrect.

Blocking transactions? I don't think anyone was talking about that.

If "enough" miners don't require a fee, then some transactors will not send transactions with a fee, and many others will simply send insignificant fees (like now). Some miners that were mining for a profit will no longer be able to make a profit, and they will stop mining.

Despite what someone else claimed, this does not make confirmations take longer, increasing the price of transactions, and incentivizing more miners to mine, because of the fixed time to mine a block.

Either this will reduce the security of the bitcoin network, or stakeholders will mine "at a loss" to avoid losing their bitcoins.

And, it's silly to make stakeholders do PoW.

Add:

LOL, I didn't make that hypothesis. I don't know what you're talking about :-)

Don't worry! There will be a SWIFT-a-like sidechain that will regulate interplanetary transfers