A different way to create coinbase transaction

AFAIK when a miner succeeds in creating a block, he puts a special transaction (coinbase) in it which spends no input and sends a fixed amount of BTC to an address he can arbitrarily specify.

Instead of doing so, can we do the following: Miner simply puts an address in the block header. When he succeeds in creating the block, all nodes that receive this block create the coinbase transaction -which spends no input and sends the fixed amount to the address in header- in their UTXO pool.

Would that work?

SpiderRico

Posted 2018-02-15T14:15:55.697

Reputation: 311

Why to make that change? What's the difference? – Osias Jota – 2018-02-15T14:23:01.480

Curiosity. Don't think it is any better than current model in any way. Just curious if it's feasible or not. – SpiderRico – 2018-02-15T14:23:46.413

2No, I mean what's the rationale behind it? To separate mining work from transaction selection? – Osias Jota – 2018-02-15T14:31:35.083

Answers

It's pointless to separate mining reward from transaction selection. Mining rewards and mining in general were the solution Satoshi Nakamoto gave to the very problem of transaction selection.

For example:

Alice mines a block A and gets her reward of 50 BTC, but it contains no transactions yet. So, 100 other nodes create 100 new different blocks with the transactions that will be related to the block A. What of those 100 blocks is the one you should consider the valid? You don't know, no until someone selects one of them and do the proof of work, creating a new block, B.

In the end you recreated the original Bitcoin solution, but with more indirections and network bandwidth usage.

Osias Jota

Posted 2018-02-15T14:15:55.697

Reputation: 769