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June 15, 2013, 12:40:52 AM |
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Note: While academically interesting (I hope), this is not applicable to Bitcoin without a hard fork.
The current problem of transaction spam is thus: miners collect the fees, but every full node must pay the cost of increased storage. There is, however, an elegant solution to this problem, which disincentivizes large (as in bytes, not value) transactions.
Require that each transaction destroy a small fraction of the currency unit. As satoshi himself said, lost coins are like a "donation to everyone." If the currency used floating-point or some other, non-atomic method of measuring value, this could continue indefinitely. A transaction could be considered invalid unless it destroyed some amount of currency, either directly proportional to, or exponential to, the size of the transaction itself.
This system would obviously reward those with higher balances more than those with low balances; however, it might be better than the current system, in which miners are incentivized to mine most fee-carrying transactions, regardless of the cost to the thousands of full nodes.
Another problem would be the high rate of deflation: a system like this would probably be more prone to a "deflationary spiral" than Bitcoin currently is. Making it work would require striking a difficult balance.
Thoughts?
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