The following posting is interesting on how it defines miner fees:
bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=396350Here is some of the text:
I therefore propose to reward (almost) all orphan blocks just a bit less than the confirmed block's reward. In order to do so I suggest having a mandatory tax on transactions, founding the "Bitcoin security reserve" account. Both confirmed and orphaned blocks get rewarded by the security reserve, while miners of the confirmed blocks may collect fees in addition. Since block mining is accelerated, each block contains less transaction, so the income from fees is supposedly negligible compared to the reward.
The specific proposed implementation goes as follows:
Mining rate
6 seconds per (confirmed) block. Difficulty is smoothly adjusted according to the formula
Dif_n+1 = dif_n * ( 1 + (time_n – time_n-1) / two weeks - (6 seconds / two weeks) )
where dif_k and time_k are correspondingly the difficulty and the timestamp of the k-th block.
Mandatory security tax
The tax on transaction transferring X Bitcoins is \alpha + x*\beta, meaning a constant minimal tax plus a very small percentage of the transaction. \alpha and \beta should be chosen such that the expected total taxes sum within 10 minutes is about 25 BTC, or some other security parameter.
Blocks rewarding
With respect to a certain chain, we say a block is of 0-degree if it is a member of the chain; of 1-degree if its parent is a member of the chain, of 2-degree if its parent's parent is a member of the chain, etc. I suggest rewarding the 0-3 degree blocks with 100%, 90%, 75% and 50% (correspondingly) of the average reward of a confirmed block. Blocks of degree 4 or more should not be rewarded at all.
Inspired by the fork-punishment mechanism of
eprint.iacr.org/2013/868.pdf, block headers of 1-3 degree blocks will be included, using a special syntax, within confirmed blocks. Block headers should be changed to include their miners' addresses, and a (confirmed) block is extra rewarded with 1% of the average reward for any valid block header it includes. An orphaned block header might be included only within the 10 consecutive blocks following its 0-degree ancestor.
The average (basic) reward for confirmed blocks is smoothly adjusted as follows: The 100% reward of the k-th block is given by
((Bitcoin security reserve at time_k) / ratio_k )* ((6 seconds) / 4 months)
Where ratio_k, which is the average ratio between the block-chain growth rate and the block-tree growth rate, is recursively calculated by
ratio_n+1 = (1 – (6 seconds / two weeks)) * ratio_n + (6 seconds / two weeks) * q_n
Where q_n is the total percentages of the average confirmed block reward that is rewarded on time time_n (say 100% + 90% + 50%, in case the n-th blocks contains headers of a single 1-degree block and a single 3-degree block).
Advantages and disadvantages:
The tragedy of the commons problem is solved as the total honest network is rewarded about 25BTC per 10 minutes, as it is now. Assuming the market is competitive, the total honest investment in hash-power is just a bit less than 25 BTC per 10 minutes, so the 50% attacker should be *very* rich in order to succeeds.
Smaller miners, whose probability of their valid blocks get eventually confirmed is smaller, will be rewarded just a bit less than the strong miners per a hash-power unite, Thus the network is not about to become more centralized.
The Block Discarding Attack / "Selfish Mining" is conceptually based on artificially forking the chain in order to get higher portion of the block-chain than the attacker's portion of total hash-power (which is equivalent to the attacker's portion of the block-tree). As we reward (almost) all blocks of the tree and not only those of 0-degree, this kind of attacks becomes much harder and less profitable.
We maintain a strong incentive to mine on top of the "right" chain, despite rewarding blocks that are off-chain, as their reward is slightly reduced. Moreover, we provide a strong incentive for miners to report other off-chain blocks by extra rewarding them for doing so. This is helpful not only for rewarding the 1-3 degree blocks, but also for providing the necessary information needed to choose the "right" chain.
The main disadvantage of my proposal is the mandatory tax, which in a sense contradicts the libertarian spirit of Bitcoin. Yet I believe there is no such a thing as ideal currency, and in particular, for security you have to pay. This payment might be explicit as in my proposal, or implicit as currently it is in Bitcoin (the inflation caused by the 25 BTC rewards per block form an implicit tax), but it must somehow exist - or else we shall all suffer lower security because somebody isn’t willing to pay his/her share.
Lear.
P.S. let me just link my paper few more times, in case someone have somehow missed it:
eprint.iacr.org/2013/868.pdf.
