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The simplest one to describe is only allowing zero-fee transactions if the transaction has fewer outputs than inputs, in the hope of incentivizing a reduction of the UTXO set size.
That might be too simple. This would e.g., break incentives as follows:
- Miners would be incentivized to skip inclusions of consolidatory txs, and instead only include transactions that create additional outputs, because those pay fees.
- If Miners do accept consolidatory txs for free, senders might bank a few extra outputs and then send large batched payment transactions with a bunch of extra inputs to make them free.
That might be too simple. This would e.g., break incentives as follows:
it has been an honor, postponing this response to a criticism of my trite oversimplifications by @Murch
let's hope I don't abuse the privilege more often than can be reasonably avoided by not making stupid suggestions to begin with!
honestly, I don't have any strong criticism of the aversion to any soft incentive depending on the anachronism of tolerance for some zero-fee consumption of blockspace by aligned participants.
the only undisputable anecdotes I can think of before my perversely-priced cheapness of speech drops out of relevance is that during one of the spam attacks, people were doing things like dusting onto the brainwallet generated from passphrase cat.... if someone likes leaving so many breadcrumbs that miners become brainflay afictionados, then the network should probably have some way of eventually baring fangs against consensus-legal preferences that rise to meet Jevon's Law like it's a schoolyard challenge.
the only good news might be that such changes will always be soft forks.
In conversations I've had with technical folks about long-term scalability, they've never hesitated to describe soft-forks improving the incentives for making validation more efficient. The simplest one to describe is only allowing zero-fee transactions if the transaction has fewer outputs than inputs, in the hope of incentivizing a reduction of the UTXO set size. More complicated mechanisms could play around with things like "virtual weight" calculations, and include both biases in miner policy and actual consensus requirements.
My point ... well I don't exactly have any urgent point. I doubt Bitcoin development will ever be uneventful within our lifetimes. There are just so many people with technical skills and varying economic and political opinions, that social consensus will probably never happen, especially not while Bitcoin is less than two decades young.