Idea for securing long term miner network now.
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There is still some doubt over certain aspects of the Bitcoin protocol for long term use.
One of those factors is that the number of coins given to miners decreases, as the miner’s actual work processing more and more transactions goes up. There is the problem that the network may calapse or become centralised if it is not profitable to mine.
The current transaction fee is fixed. There arguments for and against changing to a Percentage fee (%). The most obvious being changing the “Feathercoin protocol” midstream, which is not fair to early adopters and contributers.
The current transaction fee was introduced to stop dust payments and , I think, unfairly penalises small payments, which Feathercoin was set up to pay.
It will also need a review at some time soon, due to the rising Feathercoin value, as we get more established, and the transaction charge’s fixed amount setting in the source code will need adjusting.
I currently am in favour of adding a non mandatory % transaction fee, but I can now see the disadvantage of a compulsory fee. Particularly it might promote custom mining algorithms.
This is the new idea. We add an addition miners payment based on transaction number. We would choose a large number of transactions, say what Bitcoin is currently doing, and slowly give extra feathercoins based on number of transactions in the block.
I think it is relatively safe to implement, would only come into play later as transaction numbers increase, so people have time to agree to the change or move.
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I think, the current payment schema is based on the assumption, that a huge numger of transactions will be performed on a future mining network, after the actual mining of new coins drops.
Based on that assumption it is basically the ratio
[size=10pt]( * * ) / < total number of blocks found per timeframe> [/size]
that defines the income of a pool or a single miner.
If that assumed income is lower than the cost for running the mining rig, miners will drop off.
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Here’s the discussion and what is happening now with Bitcoin development for 0.9 and possible inclusion in Feathercoin v.0.8.5.2.
[url=http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1qkee0/developers_change_the_transaction_fee_to_000005/]http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1qkee0/developers_change_the_transaction_fee_to_000005/[/url]
Smarter transaction fees
Today, transaction fees are hard-coded into the Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind wallet software, and the rules surrounding those fees are a collection of heuristics that evolved over the last four years. In short, the current fee-handling code is a complicated mess that will stop working as soon as transaction volume doubles a couple of more times.
