The point is that most of the time, most of the full nodes know about 90%+ of the txs.  The current protocol relays them tx they already know about.  It is a very simplistic and not optimized protocol.  In time it will almost certainly be changed to header + coinbase + tx hashes.   If a node doesn't know about a particular tx it will request that from its peers.  That is still far less bandwidth then all nodes relaying full tx list to peers most of which already know about most or all of them who then relay the full list to their peers most of which know about most or all of them.

I think you confuse linear with exponential.   y = 2^x is exponential.   y = 2x is linear.

The miner could add just a single high fee transaction and be guaranteed the lottery.  In game theory this would be the optimal choice unless the fees were worth more than that.  So it puts a minimum economical fee on tx at higher than what a miner can simply game for himself.  The higher the fee the lower the utility of the network.


This is a non-starter.  It is an unsolved problem on a non-deterministic system.  It is fairly easy for attackers to game in order to orphan blocks of legit miners.  Still lets assume you succeed and the system can't be gamed in any way.   New coins subsidies users not miners and miners receive only tx fees of legit transactions.  The network remains far less secure or tx fees need to be excessively high.  Neither of which would make the network attractive relative to Bitcoin.   What problem are you trying to solve other than "I don't mine so I don't like it that other people get subsidized coins"?  The primary purpose of mining is to secure the network.  Any system that discourages mining is working against the basic interests of the network.  A network that is more secured is worth more than one which has inferior security.  

The new coins are a subsidy.  The purpose of a subsidy is to encourage a specific activity.  In the case of Bitcoin that activity is securing the network. 

This is the chicken and egg scenario Satoshi attempted to resolve by "bootstrapping" the network via the subsidy.  The end game is always the same all coins are distributed and network relies on tx fees.   The question is how to get there.  There are two problems with a network consisting of just a single node and a genesis block.  The first problem is how to fairly perform the initial distribution (key word is initial as the current distribution and future distribution has little in common with the initial distribution).  The second is how to subsidize the cost of the network until such time (tens of millions of users, millions of merchants, billions of transactions annually) as the network is self sufficient.  Satoshi attempted to kill two birds with one stone.

The miners will just game this by filling blocks with txs back to themselves with high fees.  If the tx in the block are 99.9% belonging to the miner then they have a 99.9% chance of winning the lottery.   If anything you just created a disincentive for a miner to ever include a legit tx unless it has an extremely high fee (as it would serve no purpose except to lower the miners chance of winning).  Since miners recover the fees paid on their own spam, there is no cost to the miner and they can make the block reward as large as they want.   This will put upward pressure of fees such that blocks will be mostly filled with miner spam and crowd out legitimate tx volume.  It is a minor issue but it would also greater incentivise selfish mining as optimally a miner would want to be 1 block ahead of the network to ensure it doesn't lose fees paid to itself in the event of losing a race.

Ok then 99.5% won't mine.  Network security would fall massively and it would be trivial to double spend the network.  The "coins" only have value because they have utility (impossible to counterfeit, and very difficult to "reverse" once confirmed).  No utility = no value and the price rapidly crashes to zero (this would have a compounding effect as not only would the compensation paid to miners drop 99% in BTC terms the falling exchange rate would mean in USD/EUR terms the compensation would fall 99.99%+).

Satoshi always intended "minting" to not only solve the initial distribution problem but to acts as a subsidy.  The subsidy keeps fees low while the network grows.  Another way to look at it is right now fees make up about 1% of total miner compensation.  This means everything else being equal to purchase the same amount of security tx volume would either need to be 100x as high or the average fee per tx would need to be 100x as high.   Neither of those are realistic.  Even with rapid organic growth we are probably many years from such tx volume, and raising fees to be $5 to $10 per tx would cripple utility and adoption.  The (declining) subsidy gives the network time to grow the the volume levels where fees would make it self sufficient.  The subsidy "buys" 99%+ of the security that is available today.  You can't remove 99% of the compensation to miners and expect anything other than security falling 99% (or more).


Actually as proposed it would be very easy to game.  The subsidy protects the network but it also serves the purpose of being hard to "game".  Please describe in exact details how you would distribute 25 BTC "randomly" in such a manner that it would be fair.  Hint: if you could solve that problem (sybil attack) you wouldn't need mining at all.  Using the same logic nodes would simply determine the fairest sequence of transactions (i.e. instant confirmations with no cost, delay, or fraud).

This is an even worse "solution" security of the network would fall off massively or miners would simply demand much higher fees in compensation.  Miners could still game this by including all "real" high fee txs and then filling the block with tx back to addresses controlled by the miner (with high fees = going right back to miner anyways).  Miners could set the reward to be whatever they wanted possibly even higher than the current reward.  Of course lower fee and free tx would never be included in a block, you just created a penalty that punishes miners for including those txs (by directly lowering their gross revenue).

The first is a hex string, the second is a byte array.  Conversion between the two is a pretty standard programing task.  I would google "javascript convert hex to byte array".

They are the same exact value.

The sequence of integers each represent one byte (0-255) or 8 bits.  A Hex value is 4 bits.  So it takes two hex digits to represent one byte.

0x5b = 91
0x8d = 141
...
0xde = 222

They aren't screwed.  The tx will still be included in blocks by other miners.   Also the excluding miners will lose the tx fees and that will make them less competitive relative to other pools and if the actual miners disagree with that loss they will leave and the pool (and pool operator's profits) will shrink.   Today fees are relatively small but as a % of total miner compensation they will only grow.

It is also possible (but not probable) that he inadvertently jumped into a parallel dimension where he never owned those Bitcoins.  Jumping right to private key could be duplicated is just about as silly.

Really?  Your average cashier can identify fraudulent coins with 99%+ accuracy?  Easy to weigh, validate purity, check dimensions?  Effective for use in eCommerce, mail/phone order transactions, and in money/value transfers to a different location?  Gold and silver and completely worthless as a medium of exchange.  They retain a high price because they are still effective as a store of value (for now).

It is after 8PM Eastern so there is no active support at the current time, we don't have or promise 24/7 support.  I will however have someone contact you by email to make arrangements.  There was a delay which prevented the wire from going out the same day.  To give us a larger window to avoid this in the future I have changed the cutoff time from 5PM Eastern to 4PM Eastern.  If possible the wire will be cancelled and you can make an alternate withdraw request by PayPal.

Not the best example.  Coin2 PoS was 51% attacked.

No treasury bonds are not the monetary base either.  They also by definition are IOUs as well.

Paper federal reserve notes are just as much as IOUs as digital dollars.  The monetary base has nothing to do with how much cash is printed.

Thanks.   That does make the overhead much more manageable
4200 tx = CEIL(LOG2(4200)) = 14 * 32 = 448 bytes

I still think an "aux" field does merit some consideration if/when block header is updated.  Bitcoin also benefits through the use of merged mining. Anything that lowers the barrier for adoption over other methods helps to secure the Bitcoin chain by not diverting resources towards incompatible security systems.

Merge mining is an awesome concept which can "reuse" the existing Bitcoin infrastructure to secure multiple blockchain type systems (not all of which need to be "currencies").  As currently implemented I believe it will not be a viable option for new chains as Bitcoin tx volume grows.  Correction: overhead grows only by the log of the tx volume so this is less of an issue although the overhead could be dropped further.

To link the aux chain to the bitcoin PoW the block hash of the aux chain needs to be encoded in the bitcoin block.  As the bitcoin block structure has no field for holding arbitrary values it is encoded in the coinbase transaction.  To link the coinbase tx to the merkle root hash in the blockheader requires recording the merkle branch.  The size of the merkle branch in bytes is (32 * num_txns / 2). (32 * log2(num_txns).  

One way to improve the efficiency of merged mining would be to add an fixed length "aux" 32 byte field to the blockheader.  This would make the bitcoin block header marginally larger but wouldn't make the full block any larger.  The bitcoin protocol can be extended by introducing a new version of the block header. It would be optimal to bundle a number of changes together in the next version of the blockheader.

Some ideas on how the blockheader can be extended in a manner which doesn't break compatibility with existing ASIC infrastructure:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=626377.0

This.  A 40KG gold bullion bar is a store of value.  It is not a very good medium of exchange.  Gold in general has always remained a store of value however over time it became an inferior medium of exchange.

You asked if the bitcoin-core client will relay double spends.  Now you are asking if double spending an unconfirmed tx is possible.  That is a totally different question.  The answers are no and yes respectively.  The miner could have been dishonest accepting a fee to include a double spend in the block, or the miner could have been the attacker.  The first tx may not have been relayed through the network because it had insufficient fees or violated another rule for standard txs.

The 1990s called and they want their T1 line back.