Some OCEAN miners have started using the Coin Age Priority algorithm during building block templates using DATUM. Originally, bitcoin Core originally selected transactions to include in blocks based on what they had seen first in their mempool. This logic was eventually replaced by the prioritization of older coins, meaning those that had been unspent for longer, over other coins. Eventually, this was only applied to a small portion of the block space, and then finally removed entirely around the time of Segwit. It is still held on bitcoin Knots.
I can only speculate on the miners' motives for doing this, but given OCEAN's rhetoric I can assume it has something to do with prioritizing “financial” transactions over others. Even if not, even if it is simply to help small value UTXO owners, it is still just as irrational.
You can divide the block space as a miner however you want and prioritize the order of transactions as you wish within those partitions, but that doesn't change the fact that block space is a fungible commodity that is valued on an open market. Using criteria other than fee to decide which transactions to include will leave money on the table. The only situation in which that would not be true is one in which those criteria were 1:1 identical to deciding based on rate, which would be a meaningless criterion.
Creating a subsection of block space selected based on other criteria ultimately accomplishes two things: 1) leaves money on the table as a miner, since by definition any meaningful criteria without fees results in charging fewer fees, and 2) creating a pool of block space submitted to competitive “fee” pressures according to the different criteria being used, without any of those pressures generating direct revenue increases for miners using these new criteria.
Ultimately, the new blockspace subsection does not reduce fee pressure, it simply leaves them making less money and users take advantage of this new transaction selection criteria subject to different competitive pressures that miners do not directly benefit from.
There is no hiding the reality that block space is a fungible commodity that is priced on the open market. You can accept that or you can lose money. The only alternative is to futilely try to censor classes of transactions you don't like, and if you succeed, you destroy a core property of bitcoin in the process.
That mining remains decentralized and widely distributed with many small operators is critical to bitcoin's resistance to censorship. It's a shame to see signs like this that such small miners are economically irrational, as it has huge implications for their long-term success.
This article is a Carry. The opinions expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of btc Inc or bitcoin Magazine.
