Peter R
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August 10, 2014, 01:28:24 AM


Still kind-of open question for me (also touched on in that gist): what does this do to incentives?


Yes. I was really pleased to see his write-up!
I think the incentives are much improved. The use of IBLT blocks means that miners which hide transactions (like double-spends) are disincentivized to do that because if they publish an IBLT they are relying on the rest of the network having all the transactions in their own mempool and not having to look for missing ones. IBLT blocks which have the best propagated transactions are most likely to win the race to get accepted and built upon. It is a win-win paradigm improvement.

When I read his tweet, I was concerned that O(1) block propagation would drop transaction fees too low and allow the blockchain to fill up with spam.

After reading this new write-up, I see the IBLT proposal not only improves TPS throughput, but also improves incentives.  It takes some power away from centralized miners and returns it to the nodes!  If you are anti-social and try to propagate blocks full of weird transactions that the network doesn't know about or that were dropped due to insufficient fees, then there's a better chance your block gets orphaned and you lose the coinbase reward.