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Optimal blocks aren't really a priority for miners because the fact that you win the race is worth, ballpark, 250X (the coinbase transaction's segniorage award
by patio11 12y ago
Optimal blocks aren't really a priority for miners because the fact that you win the race is worth, ballpark, 250X (the coinbase transaction's segniorage award of 25 BTC) what the transaction fees for the transactions included in the block is. Optimizing for a few percent extra transaction fees doesn't meaningfully change the economics, and if it slows you appreciably, could potentially cost you that segniorage if someone else beats you to the punch.
Accoringly most miners appear to just use really cheap heuristics.
- 0x0 12y agoAren't block awards supposed to reach 0 after a while, so that tx fees become the only incentive for mining? In those cases optimizing may be well worth the effort?
- lockes5hadow 12y agoHopefully by that point the block size will be bigger. If the block size is bigger, than the problem is just "include every transaction". But yes, the bitcoin rewards will continue halving until sometime in 2110-2140, where they hit zero. At some point, transaction fees will be more important than the block reward. Therefore, to be efficient miners would need to solve the knapsack problem if they wanted to create a maximum value block. However, we are lucky here, the knapsack problems is one of the few NP-complete problems that isn't a total mess to deal with, and can be solved in O(nW) time, where W is the greatest common divisor for the weights and n is the length of the input.
- neurobro 12y agoIf blocks were closer to optimal, it should have the effect of raising transaction fees to ensure timely confirmation, which would improve the reward ratio somewhat. Maybe it still wouldn't be significant.