Blockbounties: New Creative Way to Solve the Scaling Dilemma?

A fascinating new website has recently surfaced that provides a creative way to address the blocksize dilemma. The website is blockbounties.info, and it acknowledges that bounties or prizes can be given to miners who mine blocks larger than 1mb. 

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The webpage mentions there is no market incentive for a miner to mine blocks larger than 1mb, because they would be ignored by the rest of the network and not receive any rewards for doing work.

On May 3, a 1mb transaction was signaled on the network under the title “save the chain!” This transaction pays a miner roughly 274 bitcoin if they include the transaction in a block.

The site elaborated,

On May 3, 2017, a 1mb transaction was published under the title ‘Save the Chain!’, which pays almost 274 bitcoin to any miner who includes it in a block. Doing so would force the block size to exceed the 1mb limit, however, so the incentive needs to be quite large (and any miner who accepts the challenge needs to be creative in how they encourage other miners to follow their lead).

Claiming Bounties and Temporary Solution

The site mentions it is possible to create these bounties or additional rewards only after the “save the chain!” transaction is included on a block. There is also a page on the website that allows miners to “claim” these bounties. It contains multiple bounties that can be included in a transaction.

This method may come across as a temporary solution or way to “cheat” the network into accepting larger-sized blocks, but it appears to be an efficient market incentive to start expanding the block size in a way that rewards maverick miners and others willing to take risks.

Submitting a Bounty and Bounty Hunting

Individuals can also submit bounty rewards for miners to obtain on blockbounties.info. The site says anyone who is capable of creating and signing bitcoin transactions can create their own rewards for miners. They simply upload their transaction in hex format and it will be added to the bounty pool. The site continued,

In order for a transaction to be valid, it must reference one of the outputs from the original 1MB transaction, and must provide all or most of its funds as a miner fee.

This ability to create bounties may produce a ripe market for blockchain-based bounty hunting. The incentive structure is here, and it could lead into a scenario where the block size grows as a result of off-algorithm reward returns.

This is interesting, because it provides miners with alternative routes to procure gains without necessarily following strict protocol. However, the integrity of the bitcoin blockchain is maintained throughout the process. The market oftentimes produces beautiful solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems. If it works is another question, though.

Do you see blockbounties as a viable solution or only a temporary fix? Let us know in the comments section below.

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