In Peercoin, transaction fees are destroyed. So apart from supporting the network in which the miner has a stake, what’s the incentive for a miner to include any transaction in his blocks?.
Thanks in advance.
He/She spares the time to manipulate the client software and/or mining software. Time is money! Most miners/minters do not even have the technical skills to do that.
Why doesn’t everybody throw all his waste into the wilderness or out of the window while going on a highway at night? They could safe the waste collection fee!
I think it is safe to assume cooperative behavour of most of the people when little costs are involved. It’s the same like with the “nothing-at-stake” argument.
I believe the incentive is as you said: supporting the network in which the miner has a stake.
True, it’s a weaker incentive than in bitcoin, where transaction fees are received by the miner. However, it still appears to be strong enough to be functional, since PPC has been running for over two years with no transaction-exclusion attacks, to my knowledge.
So from what you say, there is no rational incentive (but an altruistic and possibly superrational one) to include transactions. I don’t like how Peercoin relies so much on the assumption that under these conditions, people will still behave honestly.
What about when the protocol-mandated fee is almost worthless (due to inflation or depreciation), and it is easy to spam the network with transactions?. What defends against this?.
[quote=“marioxcc, post:4, topic:3413”]So from what you say, there is no rational incentive (but an altruistic and possibly superrational one) to include transactions. I don’t like how Peercoin reliance so much on the assumption that under these conditions, people will still behave honestly.
What about when the protocol-mandated fee is almost worthless (due to inflation or depreciation), and it is easy to spam the network with transactions?. What defends against this?.[/quote]
If I understand it right, the transactions get included automatically based on the timestamp because they don’t have to compete for the fees. The actual fee can be adjusted in the future if required (we were actually talking about lowering it about a year ago) but for now it seems to work well.
Hi Marioxcc,
As I said above, saving time is a rational incentive. You spare the time to manipulate the client software when you behave cooperatively. Even if there was no cost involved (say a manipulated software was readily available online from a trusted source), there is lots of scientific evidence, that under certain circumstances, people cooperate, when cooperative behaviour is expected. Why do roughly 50-70% of people go to vote in national elections when there are millions of voters? The chance that your own vote is the one that decides the election is minmal. Voting is no rational behaviour.
Also, you do not really seem to seriously consider Chronos’ argument about the stake that minters have in the network. There are individuals with >100.000 PPC, and even two addresses with >1.000.000 PPC. The higher the stake, the more rational it is to forward transactions to support the network. Even for somebody with lets say “only” 2.500 PPC, which currently is around $1.000, I would say there is strong motivation to support the network.
And why are there so many posts in this Forum? If the tragedy of the common was the only principle of behaviour that matters, this Forum would be pretty dead. Everybody would wait for everybody else to do something to bring Peercoin forward.
By the way, the community could also agree to reward miners and minters with the transactions fee instead of destroying them.
You also mentioned, that if the price of Peercoin was much lower, the 0.01 PPC transaction fee would be an almost worthless amount, and the network could be spammed at very low costs:
In that case the community could agree to increase the transaction fee to say 0.1 PPC or 1 PPC.