Comment on Is the blockchain an interesting innovation, aside from cryptocurrencies ?
dragontamer@lemmy.world 11 months agoBlockchain as a definitive record of ownership? Absolutely not.
Oh, its worse than you think.
www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/…/mining_CCS.pdf
Once BTC hits enough halvening-cycles, the entire protocol doesn’t work anymore. Its more beneficial to fork the blockchain (and collect ~50 transaction fees), rather than work on the head (and only collect ~5 transaction fees).
nulldev@lemmy.vepta.org 11 months ago
What’s wrong with that though? BTC handles forks just fine. Eventually one fork will win out and life will continue on as usual.
The bigger issue this paper presents is that miners become incentivized to mine empty blocks. But can’t you just enforce a minimum transaction count on blocks?
magic_lobster_party@kbin.social 11 months ago
Miners can just create their own nonsense transactions.
nulldev@lemmy.vepta.org 11 months ago
There’s only incentive to do that if the mempool is empty. If the mempool is full, there will be plenty of transactions for both the first miner and the next miner.
In fact, this entire paper only makes sense if the mempool is near empty. If the mempool is full, then there is no reason to mine an empty block because there will always be transactions left for future miners.
So basically: