1
Nowadays, a miner can gain more than another one even when they mine the same amount of blocks due to variance in tx fees. It's expected that, especially once the coinbase reward is gone, this will result in miners competing for "juicy" txs and hence damaging the stability of the system. See https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2978408 for future reference.
I've been thinking if it's possible to overcome this simply by changing the rewarding mechanisms of Bitcoin. So let's say we keep a k-length jumping window, take sum of fees in that window and divide it evenly to miners. So if we have k=4 and 1st block has 20 in fees, 2nd has 20 in fees, 3rd has 10 in fees and 4th has 30 in fees each miner will get (20+20+10+30)/4 = 20 in fees.
What would be shortcomings/downsides of such a mechanism ?
When using an aggregative method as you have suggested, how would you ensure that the total amount of bitcoin paid in fees, is the same as the total amount of bitcoin collected from fees? The moving averages that are collected wouldn't sum to exactly the sum of the bitcoin paid. – Matthew Charles Stannard – 2018-01-08T17:50:45.217
The moving averages that are collected wouldn't sum to exactly the sum of the bitcoin paid.Why is that? I don't see. Fee of each block is simply Input sum - Output sum. Is there anything more to this than that ? – SpiderRico – 2018-01-08T18:44:00.060For each block yes. But not over an aggregation of blocks. – Matthew Charles Stannard – 2018-01-08T18:54:38.940
1But if we add each block individually, what do we miss ? Surely, we can go back k blocks in the chain and aggregate each block, no ? – SpiderRico – 2018-01-08T19:05:07.487
Hmm, I've misread your question... Yes, what you have described is possible. You may have found a solution to Undercutting attacks. – Matthew Charles Stannard – 2018-01-08T19:21:13.973
Would you be able to formalize your idea and post it as answer to the following question? https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/67697/can-undercutting-attacks-be-mitigated
– Matthew Charles Stannard – 2018-01-08T19:29:27.710@MatthewStannard I'll think a bit more it and possibly try doing some simulations. If I get some nice results, sure :) – SpiderRico – 2018-01-08T19:31:53.537
Let us continue this discussion in chat.
– Matthew Charles Stannard – 2018-01-08T19:32:08.457