In the wake of Segwit2x collapse, I have a couple of thoughts that I would love to get the community's input on.
I believe the implementation of SegWit was a necessary step to alleviate an immediate problem but I also see it as a temporary patch for a really complex scalability problem.
My first concern with the current Bitcoin implementation is the control miners have over the transaction pool.
I do not wish to put words in "Satoshi Nakamoto"s mouth but after reading the the original Bitcoin white paper (
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf) I cannot help but think that having the ability to cherry-pick transactions from the pool based on how profitable they will be goes against the whole idea of Bitcoin in the first place.
Even the introduction insist on the fact that the intent of the experiment was to create a currency that would bypass financial institutions in order to reduce processing fees an allow for lighter/casual transactions.
Yet here we are, replacing overhead related fees with sheer greed.
Side chains ( and Lightning ) seem to be the current favoured alternative to increasing the block size. Much smarter people than I are debating the issue and I have not been able to come up with any constructive way solution other that the block size increase itself. But that will not solve the transaction cherry-picking behaviour.
I've been trying to find a way to hide or encrypt the amount of fees in a given transaction but it seems impossible given the nature of bitcoin itself.
This leaves the role of nodes and how they feed mempool transactions to miners.
A couple of thoughts :
- Could the assignment of transactions to miners be randomised in some way ? or forced to be first-in-first-out ?
- Could the "difficulty level" be modulated by a penalty factor proportional to the age difference between the transactions in the last block and the transactions still in the mempool ?
Or am I understanding this all wrong ?
