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Could a miner who wanted more transaction fees manipulate the fee produced by estimatefee? If so, what percentage of hashpower would it take, and how long would you need it?
Can the fee produced by estimatefee be artificially manipulated?
Answers
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No, estimatefee is calculated locally by bitcoind in function of some statistics done on mempool.
Ok, but those transactions are received from remote nodes, right? – Nick ODell – 2015-07-04T01:53:44.427
ye, but not from a single node. A miner can't change your estimatefee behavior. – lorenzoasr – 2015-07-07T20:41:58.347
Miners can change your estimatefee behavior. For example, they can accept very low fee transactions. – Nick ODell – 2015-07-07T22:15:18.447
In your question you are talking about "a miner", and the answer is no, a single miner cannot do this. – lorenzoasr – 2015-07-09T00:35:18.610
It's an estimator based on the assumed policy of recently mined blocks, that is, if a large miner has a policy that only takes transactions paying 1BTC per kilobyte then the estimation will naturally rise. I'm not what you would class as manipulation in that versus
estimatefeeworking as intended. Most wallets currently pay a flat fee per kilobyte, so I doubt much research has been done into it thus far anyway. – Anonymous – 2015-06-27T04:38:50.807@Bitcoin What if the miner used his own money pay transaction fees, to pretend that there were more transactions paying 1 BTC than there really are? – Nick ODell – 2015-06-27T15:43:20.920
I don't think that would have much effect but I'll look into it. You would have to be pretty determined to do that, if you attempted a sizable amount of "fake" fees in a block someone can just fork yours out and take the fees for themselves. – Anonymous – 2015-06-27T22:12:56.517