Some OCEAN miners have started utilizing the Coin Age Priority algorithm while building block templates using DATUM. Originally Bitcoin Core chose which transactions to include in a block based on what it saw first in the memory pool. This logic was eventually replaced by prioritizing older coins, those that had been left unused for a long time, over other coins. This eventually applied to only a small portion of blockspace and was eventually phased out completely around the time of Segwit. It is still maintained at Bitcoin Knots.
We can only speculate about the miners' motivations for doing this, but given OCEAN's rhetoric, we can speculate that it has something to do with prioritizing “financial” transactions over other transactions. Even if it wasn't, it's still irrational in every way, even if it was purely to help small UTXO holders.
Although we are free to partition blockspace as miners and prioritize transactions arbitrarily within those partitions, the fact remains that blockspace is a fungible good that is valued on the open market. If criteria other than fees are used to decide which trades to include, funds will remain on the table. The only situation in which this would not be the case is if these criteria were one-to-one identical to making a decision based on price, which would be a meaningless criterion.
Creating subsections of the blockspace selected by other criteria ultimately accomplishes two things. 1) By definition, using a meaningful non-fee rate criterion means you'll be collecting less fees, so you're leaving money behind as a miner, and 2) Creating a bucket of block space that's sent to There will be pressure for competitive “fees” depending on the different criteria used, but with this new standard, that pressure will not result in direct revenue increases for miners.
The new subsection of blockspace will not ultimately reduce fee pressure, it will simply reduce revenue, and users who take advantage of this new transaction selection criteria will be exposed to various competitive pressures that miners will not directly benefit from. That's it.
There is no hiding from the reality that blockspace is a fungible commodity that can be priced in the open market. You can accept it or you may lose money. The only option is to try in vain to censor types of transactions you don't like, and if you happen to succeed, you will destroy Bitcoin's core assets in the process.
It is important for Bitcoin's censorship resistance that mining is decentralized, with many small operators widely spread out. It's disappointing to see signs that small miners like this are economically unreasonable, given that this has a huge impact on their long-term success.
This article is take. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
