Bitcoin Forum

Anything written on the blockchain becomes permanent provided that bitcoin keeps surviving.

Written on the blockchain is therefore the digital equivalent of “carved into stone”

“Written on the blockchain” = “Set in stone” 

I strongly believe that this property gives intrinsic value to the blockspace.

My hope is to spark a discussion around this topic, and I want to ask you the following three questions:

A:
Is it important to maintain the intrinsic value of the blockspace?
Is this property of any importance to the bitcoin network?

B:
How can we best maintain the intrinsic value of the blockspace?

C:
What is the best mechanism to determine the price of blockspace?


The price of blockspace will always be determined by the market...
But the process used to set the price will depend on some fundamental conditions in the market:

If the blocks are full:
Miners will simply fill the blocks based on the fees that are payed by the users.
Users are competing for blockspace, and the price is determined by how much the users are willing to pay for the blockspace.

If blocks are not full:
Miners are competing to offer the lowest price for blockspace. They try to include as much as possible while at the same time excluding those who pays too little.
The price of blockspace is determined by how little the miners are willing to demand in fees.

Please let me know what you think about A, B and C!

Thank you for reading this post!

An interesting question.  Leaving messages are possible to do .

I suppose a business model could be place your name in the blockchain.

It would be better then place you name on a star since it would not be stars repeatedly used.

Maybe you and I could have a business for 10(20?) bucks place your name in the block chain.

https://antpool.com/coinbase.htm

That model allows for your message to be appended to AntPool's signature on the coinbase transaction.  Anyone can add whatever message they want to any transaction.  Using Bitcoin Core, you create a transaction with your hex-encoded message, sign the transaction and send it out.  Prior to 0.12.x, this had to be done manually (I wrote code to do it a while back), but now it's part of the createrawtransaction API.

A. It is definitely important to maintain the irreversible nature intrinsic to the blockchain

B. The intrinsic value is already maintained

C. I have no idea about that one ??? ;D

I feel like the value of blockspace is nearly 0 since there are so many blocks and you can write a message on any transaction.  Maybe there could be some value on special blocks like consecutive number blocks or things like that, or like a block that represents your birthday or an important date.  Other than that I don't see much value what so ever.