Developers could force the first moment of mining after a prior block to also be unsolvable thus every block would have a minutes time to load tx's
This will not solve it. If you force miners to not mine an empty block, for example for the first minute, then I can tell you, what miners can do: they can set the time of the block, one minute into the future, mine that block, and broadcast it to the network, but just one minute later.
And guess what: in that case, miners in the lucky pool would have one minute of advantage, because the block will be already mined, and they will start building on top of that, before everyone else will receive it.
In the past, there were some attacks, related to delaying the block propagation. You don't want to make that attack a consensus rule. And you don't want to force honest miners into connecting to competing pools, and checking their block headers, to make sure, that the system is honest, and they do not secretly mine on some future header, that is not yet broadcasted.
Edit: Also note that delaying block time on consensus level is potentially dangerous. Why? Imagine a soft-fork, that would force the time of the block to be always 20 minutes or later. Guess what will happen: the difficulty will drop into the minimum, and will stay there, so it will cause blockstorms, like in testnet3.
Of course, in case of one minute delay, it won't be that bad, but note that introducing any delay on consensus level will lower the difficulty. And then, the question is: do you want to lower the difficulty, below the level, determined by the free market of Proof-of-Work? Do you want to force smart miners into mining a long chain of blocks in advance, and sharing them later, when the time of the block would allow broadcasting it to the network? Because that is the consequence of those changes, if you left everything else unchanged.
Edit: Obviously, I have no proof for that, but I guess even if the block reward will be zero, then we will still have empty blocks. Why?
1. Because of coinbase maturity. If some mining pool have some coins in some recent blocks, then 100 blocks are needed, even if the coinbase reward for them will be set to zero. Unlocking the coins may still be worth pushing a block with zero reward.
2. Because of difficulty changes. Even if no coins are produced, then new blocks can help to enforce the proper difficulty. You cannot force miners to stop, and rely on the promise, that they will obey your rules.
3. To notarize things on-chain. Currently, regular payments are fighting with Ordinals, but if you use Bitcoin by the book, then you can note, that if you want to timestamp any document, then all you need, is just pushing some 256-bit number. And all of that can be hidden behind some public key, or some signature. Which means, even if no coins are produced, then someone may still be interested in mining a block, just to refer to some public key or signature, as a proof, that some document existed at a given time.
4. To consolidate coins, or perform some other actions by some mining pool. Even if you have no new transactions, then still, you can have some of your own transactions, and that can be a good moment to push them. Because you are the creator of those transactions (they could also use zero fee), you can be 100% sure, that they are valid, and you can include them in your block template.
Edit: Maybe I should add more explanation to the last point: each transaction has a field called "locktime". If it is set, and mining some block number is needed to make it spendable, or passing some point in time is required, then even empty blocks with no reward, can still be used to unlock such transactions. Which makes it redundant with point number one, but just applied more widely, to non-coinbase transactions.
Well this simply means that in 2036 more and more miners will move towards scrypt.
Miners are $ per watt no more no less.
BTW Satoshi's whole creation was based on $ per watt or Power to wealth.
So in 2036 if blocks pay 0.39??? + 0.50 = 0.89
where is the value it is in the fees not the rewards.
We are heading into a new era of mining.
So if developers leave it alone as you suggest. Miners will need to balance do I want a 10 second block that pays me 0.39 or do I want a 2 minute block that pays me 0.39 + 0.50 = 0.89
We all know 10 sec blocks are rare
We all know clocks for blocks vary as much as 50 seconds from true time.
We all know pools play with everything they can think of for an edge.
I do wish I could be 36 rather than 66 as I would love to see this play out in the 2036 to 2056 time frame.
I would be 79-99 and likely not care as much as I get that old.
I just see scrypt as have solved the volume issue with 12 blocks vs 1 for sha
I see scrypt as having solved the reward issue with Doge's constant reward of 10,000 coins
it would be year 42 in 2056 for doge so the inflation would be reduced to about 2%
as doge does inflation as such
1 x
2 2x 100%
3 3x 50%
4 4x 33%
5 5x 25%
*
10 10x
11 11x 10%
*
20 20x
21 21x 5%
It looks more and more like BTC will be wealth storage item
and scrypt will be smaller monies
Your argument that developers won't be able to fix it seems sound.
My argument that miners will do the easy thing shift to scrypt is likely to happen.
as
0.39 + 0 = 0.39
vs
0.39 + 0.50 = 0.89 in 2-36 only will become worse by 2056
heck in 2044 empty block will be
0.09765625 + 0 = 0.09765625
vs
0.09765625 + 0.5 = 0.59765625.
that is a tremendous hardship for pools doing 1 block every few days.
So we could have 3 pools doing 33% each as they would be able to handle those fast shit blocks since they make 48 blocks a day the shitty 0 fee blocks average out.
all other miners will need to shift to scrypt as it will never have that issue.
Am I making $ sense
