Both of the blocks those tx were confirmed in were mined by f2pool
yeah, I wonder if it's f2 specifically doing some shenanigans...
This kind of transaction that outputs 294 sats at the cost of 32,220 sats to a miner fee only makes sense if you are the one mining the transaction--and seeing this being done thousands of times... super sus.
reply
but then I see these appearing in MARA and Foundry... super odd...
reply
Did a little digging using Ordpool—
brc-20 token minting — all of them. You can look the tx up in Ordpool to confirm. So not miner collusion, just shitcoins.
{"p":"brc-20","op":"mint","tick":"dfsn","amt":"5"}
reply
Thanks! I find this usage to be totally insane but I guess it’s a thing people want to do. So bizarro.
reply
Once Binance listed ORDI it was game on I think.
reply
maybe they've calculated it forward and realized that by doing this kind of operation, it doesn't matter who collects the fees because the increased block fees are giving every block an additional 2BTC+ so they make it up and then some every time they successfully mine a block.
Interesting case for decentralized collusion.
reply
And I guess having more pools wouldn't help, because they could all still collude and achieve the same result. It would just be harder for a larger set of entities to collude.
But doesn't the prisoner's dilemma work against such collusion?
reply
Does it? If you spend .25BTC every 5 blocks in order to pump the average fee price in the mempool, you mine 1/5 of the blocks, you recapture some of that spend, and ensure that when you do mine a block, you get an extra 2-3BTC in fees. Has someone done a robust modeling of the trade-off for a large miner to engage in this kind of behavior?
reply
And what if you don't spend extra, will you not get an extra 2-3 BTC in fees because the others did?
Sorry if I'm not making sense, I haven't thought much about it and am just thinking out loud. If there are indeed incentives for collusion, wouldn't this be a long term solution to the security budget issue? They would be incentivized to spend even more for even higher block rewards, but not so much that Bitcoin becomes useless and loses value.
reply