Base Block Reward On Transactions Rather than Block?

[theonewhowaskazu]

Would it be possible to base the block reward on the number of transactions (or BTC inputs) rather than just making it halve every X blocks?

For example, wouldn't it make more sense to bring about the reward halving sooner when BTC is changing hands a lot (velocity is up) rather than when it is down in the dumps, because velocity contributes to price inflation?

[PRab]

Yes, but there are 2 immediate issues that I see.

1. This would be a hard fork or an alt coin.
2. This would allow the miners to game the system. Each miner could fill up a block with a bunch of dummy transactions to make it look like velocity is up or mine empty blocks to slow down velocity.

I'm not saying that it is a bad idea, but I don't see any major advantage to it either. In general, the block reward can be based on anything that can be calculated by looking at the existing blockchain.

[solex]

Thing is that Bitcoin has been running well for 5 years with the current paradigm. Fees are slowly rising and there is no reason to think that they can't supersede (swamp) the block reward in 10 or 20 years as Satoshi intended.

This type of experiment could be done with an alt coin. There are at least 100 of them. If it somehow proves to be a remarkable success then maybe something could be learned from it.