After Bitcoin (BTC) mining pool operators decided to reduce their minimum trading fees to 1/100 million BTC on July 15, the knock-on effect makes them vulnerable to blockchain forks.
Advanced developers pointed out the risk of escalation involved Compact block propagation time, This is a direct result of fee reductions this summer. “They took away the fees just to hurt themselves,” he lamented.
Because of the context of this new vulnerability and how pool operators shot themselves with their feet, it is important to understand the context of this vulnerability amid the three major changes in Bitcoin since June.
Bitcoin collects while trading fees crash
Bitcoin (BTC) has changed dramatically in three ways this summer.
First, the number of BTC finance companies emulating micro-strategy (MSTR) has doubled and has won Faddish’s “Paper Bitcoin Summer” label on social media. Dozens of companies sold paper, or stocks, to collect Wall Street investments at Spot BTC.
This demand has resulted in rising prices for BTC, along with favorable policies from the Donald Trump administration. As the network focus has shifted from on-chain use to off-chain accumulation, fewer investors are transferring spot BTC to individual wallets.
Second, the Bitcoin core developers have decided to ease storage restrictions with the controversial OP_Return change. Kick-off in the summer on June 9th, the most popular Node Software lead developers deployed a red carpet for those looking to store media and commercial data on the blockchain.
This change should welcome the masses of artists, collectors, businesses and data rollups. Instead, data storage is stagnant, with many blocks only partially filling these days.
read more: Bitcoin’s minimum trading fees have been reduced by 90%
Finally, the node operator and mining pool operator decided to reduce the conventional Mempool transaction fee to Satoshi/vbyte below 90%.
Rather than welcoming new users into the network and growing PIE, this change has continued to crash transaction fees to multi-year lows.
This 90% fee reduction change increases the risk of temporary chain forks for mining pool operators.
Compact Block Propagation
Senior developer Matt Coraro has expressed concern about compact block propagation times in the crater pricing environment this summer.
Compact blocks are the standard way to mining pools, and update in real time for blocks like the current Prime Minister and the next possible convenience. For node operators such as delay times, remote locations, or pools with poor internet connections, Compact Block Propagation There are important messaging tools to avoid the long period of time that otherwise blocks need to be propagated over unified data via data compression.
Without knowledge of current chientip and future blocks via compact block messaging tools, mining pool operators can have virtually branched blockchains within nodes until the internet connection is fully available to download all blocks, and they could lose revenue from blocks that are ultimately “orphaned” because miners don’t have it.
Certainly, many pools operate remotely to operate mining rigs using strand energy from exotic locations. “Pools are sometimes geographically diverse and even branch out of themselves,” Coraro warned.
Low Bitcoin Fee “Treck Compact Block”
Senior developer Antoine Poinsot has confirmed that rate cuts this summer have “compact blocks” for SAT/VBs from 1/100 million to 1/100 million. Bitcoin Core developer Corallo agrees that temporary increased risk of forks due to propagation times is expensive for pool operators to protect themselves.
Poinsot summarises new vulnerabilities and highlights how fee reductions are doing Increased 8,000% of essential compact data requirements for pool operators A “absolutely insane number” of realistic block propagation times ranging from less than 10 kilobytes to 800 kilobytes.
“This means that compact blocks will be completely ineffective in reducing the average block propagation time,” he concluded. There is even a risk for mining pool operators to hold their fork chains struggling to get a real-time view of their network, at the expense of a significant cost of bandwidth costs.
