Will miners include their own transactions with high fees in their blocks

[Jet Cash]

After all, the fee size doesn't matter if they are collecting it themselves. I can see a couple of advantages in this. an investment house that is running its own mining rigs could pass the fee onto a client. Also, artificially high fees can help to get Bitcoin users used to paying higher fees to prepare for the days when fees replace the mining rewards

[DaveF]

Depends on the pool.
Since I know the TX you can take a look at this one:

https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/22918b4f26302880cb03e25adbcd4f7d10bef2aebae8487b22bbd477128b103f

That is viabtc paying it's miners. They paid 3/sat byte
In the rest of the block the lowest fee I can see is 11/ sat byte

With a little poking around block explorers you can see that as a rule pools do pay a very low fee for their own TX
There might be others that pay more, but I did not see any with a quick look.

-Dave

[ranochigo]

Some of the clients that I have seen are using mempool as a source of data which could be less susceptible to this kind of attacks as the transaction has to be in the mempool for it to take effect and thus could be a net loss for the miners if another miner takes it.

There isn't much guarantees that the space that you're wasting in your blocks would actually result in larger than proportionate increase in the average fees as the miners have to consistently be inflating the fees with their own high paying transactions in their blocks. Since Bitcoin transactions are not that crucial when considering the time taken (as of now, since there isn't that many good use case for normal small value transactions), there are quite a few scenarios where users would wait for a bit for the fees to drop and thus the miners would probably have to wait for it to take effect.

[lifeforcepools]

It seems to me that it is unlikely, because it is difficult to implement.

[dothebeats]

I think some of them are just sticking to low fees if it's just their transactions. Besides, how often do miners transfer bitcoins to another address that artificially inflating the fee would affect all other users as well? Also, there is a possibility that the inflated fees from the miner might be taken by some other miner, so I don't think it's really efficient and clever to do it on their end.

There isn't much guarantees that the space that you're wasting in your blocks would actually result in larger than proportionate increase in the average fees as the miners have to consistently be inflating the fees with their own high paying transactions in their blocks. Since Bitcoin transactions are not that crucial when considering the time taken (as of now, since there isn't that many good use case for normal small value transactions), there are quite a few scenarios where users would wait for a bit for the fees to drop and thus the miners would probably have to wait for it to take effect.

I'm one of those small guys waiting a few hours before sending a transaction just to get the fees drop a little. While it's only a few sats at best, in the long run those small numbers would matter, especially now that we are already heading towards something bigger thanks to a few big companies that dipped their feet on the waters of bitcoin.

Also since most of my transactions aren't really time-sensitive and are mostly transfers to and from gambling platforms, waiting isn't even a hassle. Who knows, those few sats that I saved on a transaction fee might bring me a jackpot too lol.

[ranochigo]

I think some of them are just sticking to low fees if it's just their transactions. Besides, how often do miners transfer bitcoins to another address that artificially inflating the fee would affect all other users as well? Also, there is a possibility that the inflated fees from the miner might be taken by some other miner, so I don't think it's really efficient and clever to do it on their end.

If your fees estimator uses the moving average of the fees within the transaction included the blocks without referencing the mempool or the transactions that were once in mempool, this could artificially inflate the fees for those mechanism. You don't have to broadcast the transaction in this case so that no one else would be aware of the transaction before it's mined. I'm sure that it would not be efficient for someone to reorg the blockchain just to claim those fees.

[Jet Cash]

I might have misunderstood the possibilities for miners. Is it only possible to include transactions from the mempool in mined blocks? For example, if a miner sells some of his Bitcoins, is he able to include the transaction in his next mined block, and thus avoid paying any fees?

[BlackHatCoiner]

For example, if a miner sells some of his Bitcoins, is he able to include the transaction in his next mined block, and thus avoid paying any fees?

The miner can include any valid transaction to his block, whether if it has a tiny fee or not. The thing about fees is that you can't broadcast a transaction with no fee to other nodes' mempool, because it'll be considered as dust. The answer is yes, he can.

[Jet Cash]

So an investment house that owns a mining operation can maintain his own mempool, and give transactions in that priority when he finds a block. He could then top up his block with transactions from the main mempool to gain a bit of extra income.

[ranochigo]

So an investment house that owns a mining operation can maintain his own mempool, and give transactions in that priority when he finds a block. He could then top up his block with transactions from the main mempool to gain a bit of extra income.

Some mining pools actually pays out their miners when they mine a block and mine that transaction with no fees at all.

Yes, completely possible. Whether that will resonate well with the user is an entirely different story. Unless you're able to convince your users that even though they're paying for their transaction with a fee, they have to wait for hours, or even days for the mining pool to mine a block to include their transaction, then probably not. You would probably be better off just making the users pay for the transaction and removing the other aspect of having your own mining pool mine the TX entirely.

You can probably charge larger fees while batching transactions and gain more profit this way and probably not lose many users.

[odolvlobo]

After all, the fee size doesn't matter if they are collecting it themselves. I can see a couple of advantages in this. an investment house that is running its own mining rigs could pass the fee onto a client. Also, artificially high fees can help to get Bitcoin users used to paying higher fees to prepare for the days when fees replace the mining rewards

Investment house clients might switch if the mining fees that they are charged are too high.

The highest fees don't affect the rates that other users pay. A miner could pay themselves 1000 sats/byte or 1 million sats/byte, but it wouldn't affect how much others pay. Users are competing to pay the lowest fee possible, so it is the lowest fees that matter.

So an investment house that owns a mining operation can maintain his own mempool, and give transactions in that priority when he finds a block. He could then top up his block with transactions from the main mempool to gain a bit of extra income.

Every miner has their own copy of the mempool and is free to include or exclude any transactions that they choose in a block. Exchanges that also mine do exactly what you suggest. They prioritize their own transactions over others in order to save money on transaction fees. Or, they might pay miners to give their transactions priority.

[pooya87]

Also, artificially high fees can help to get Bitcoin users used to paying higher fees to prepare for the days when fees replace the mining rewards

Fees replacing mining reward is going to become an important matter decades from now and people will never get used to paying high fees to transfer money!

Also in order to artificially inflate the fees, one has to spam the mempool with high paying fees to fill the blocks. Sending a handful of high paying fees to mempool is not going to affect anything at all. Also if the miner is mining its own transactions (without broadcasting them) it won't affect the fees because clients don't even see it in their mempool and fee estimation is based on mempool not previous blocks.

P.S. mining pools pay their miners with a transaction that has a fee of zero. They control what transactions are "preferred" to be in the block their miners mine.

[dansus021]

speaking of fee damn i remember that my transaction from Hashnest(cloud mining by bitmain) doesn't get single confirmation for a whole 2 month i mean they are mining company right