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by JauntyHatAngle 3268 days ago
>With a blockchain, scarcity of space per block leads to a fee market forming, and fees paid increasing as the value contained per transaction increases.

Note that this is not currently the case in bitcoin, transaction fees have gone up with the current scarcity due to the arbitrary block limit, but the fees are still a pittance compared with block reward - which is the real incentive for mining (but will not always be the case as block reward reduces in the future).

This is somewhat of a sore point for the bitcoin community as a large (probably not majority, but large) portion of the user base / miners / nodes does not think scarcity of space is a good idea at current levels of transactions.

Also Ethereum (which at the moment uses a blockchain and mining mechanism very similar to bitcoins) does not impose a block size limit, rather leaves it up to the miners to decide on the "gas" limit (they have a computational limit rather than a block size, but it can be viewed as a parallel).
1 comments
immad 3268 days ago
Number of new Bitcoins a day: 2063 [1] Transaction fees in Bitcoin: 272 [2]

So transaction fees are not insignificant.

1: https://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins July 6th data 2: https://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees July 6th data

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JauntyHatAngle 3268 days ago
That's total, not per block.

Per block, fees average 0.9btc iirc.

Transaction reward is 12.5 btc

0.9 is not insignificant, but compared with block reward, the true (current) incentive providing block security is not in question, and that is what was being discussed.

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mhluongo 3268 days ago
How is that a useless figure? You'd expect it to have the same ratio per block or per day, so they're comparable when talking about the ratio of fees to rewards
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JauntyHatAngle 3258 days ago
Because we are talking about security of blocks and block scarcity, there is no limit on the space "per day", its all per block, similarly people don't make race attacks on a day, they make race attacks on a block.
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immad 3268 days ago
Per block or per day is the same thing. Also better to look at it on a day level since transactions+fees vary throughout the day
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JauntyHatAngle 3258 days ago
Because we are talking about block security. Security is not on a per day basis, its on a block basis.

people don't make race attacks on a "day" they make a race attack on a block or series of blocks.

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