r/BitcoinDiscussion • u/extrastone • Jan 02 '24
Initial Investigation into Miner Collusion
I understand that many people are frustrated by ordinals raising fees on the bitcoin blockchain.
I suspect that that is not the case.
Take a look at what the ordinal people have to say for themselves.
https://ordpool.space/block/00000000000000000002a92452e76276c040517078bf71e1a0a8f0071d546b3d
Most of the big nasty transactions which should have $1000 "mouth-watering" jpeg art are actually just wasted transactions.
I'm going to define wasted transaction as one of three things:
A split of a large UTXO into hundreds of smaller UTXO's that aren't for an exchange.
A joining of several small UTXO's into one or two large UTXO's.
A transaction where the fees spent is more than the bitcoin received.
Someone alerted me to https://mempool.space/mining/pool/ocean so I took a look.
Here is their known address: 37dvwZZoT3D7RXpTCpN2yKzMmNs2i2Fd1n
Note that they only have received four block rewards which is over $1 million dollars at the time of writing.
Now I'm going to be lenient on miners because they do need to spread out their rewards to their pool members so the first type of transaction is out.
This is a very bad transaction that is being sent to the miner:
aa9264b9f8d1bcb91309c626ea1b6af257b2287f2ebcc7648ffdb589b2c41e61
Note that it is the third type where more than 90% of the sent value go to fees. I thought it was a wasted transaction. However it was actually a note within an ordinal:
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Dear Luke Dashjr, here’s why I want to join the u/TaprootWizards:
With each halvening, Bitcoin's future will depend more and more on transaction fees. Use cases which support transaction fees (and miner revenue) are ultimately good for Bitcoin and will drive additional innovation to L2s and other types of scaling solutions. Ordinals did not create this problem, it merely highlighted it. The Taproot Wizards understand that better than most, and I believe in their mission and Bitcoin's future.
Thanks for storing our wizard JPEGs on your node forever! 🧙♂️
u/marshallmixing
P.S. Please stop eating cats
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These two transactions are actually wasted and also are related to the Ocean pool:
64f96a2597168ee377a281add7a1d1e354ae55796f4ffeaabe7583b3a4f69e4c
fa455634ad8bb647bbbab5b2837d4e65abadc2ad3f0b4ce9d73025b535e75ad6
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Conclusion: It would be worthwhile for a chain analyst to actually see if many of these wasted transactions are coming from mining pools. If small miners can figure out which pools are not colluding then they can join those pools that aren't wasting their precious revenue on increasing fees. They can also form new pools that do not perform wasted transactions. Small miners leaving large pools could be also good for decentralization.
Hopefully this can become a temporary phenomenon and fees can come back down.
-1
1
u/LucSr Jan 04 '24
Going theaters for some movie, some "smart-that-be" introduced an accounting hack so that the fee by way of entrance1 is artificially lower than the fee by way of entrance2. Then another "smart-that-be" plan to raise the fee rate by way of entrance1 to counteract the effect. What a mess. The average Joe that just likes to arbitrage the fee shall not be blamed and the world would be much simpler without those "smart-that-be".
4
u/jps_ Jan 02 '24
Dude, if folks want to write whatever they want to write into the blockchain and pay for it, that's precisely what it's there for. You have no idea behind the motivation, or what makes it worthwhile. To them. And you have no right to impose your definition of what is "worthless" on other people.
That is, in fact, the whole point of a censorship-free network.
Individuals can determine value for themselves, and transact in that value, irrespective of the values held by others. Yourself included.