The arguments against Ocean Pool's policies are evident, but why is harmless transaction QoS never discussed?
Simply put, certain transaction types (like small transactions or lightning channel actions) could get prioritized by pool's policies within a set blockspace limit.
I believe this won't harm pool revenue; in fact, it might increase it. Prioritization, say 1/3 of the blockspace, means inscribers still get transactions in, but they compete in a smaller virtual space.
Big transactions often aren't about money, so fees matter less. For instance, people won't spend 70,000 sats to send 1,000 sats but inscribers happily pay the same to mint pepes. I would argue that an higher fee could make them look more exclusive and boost their value, as seen in Ethereum versus other chains, enticing speculators to be willing to spend even more on these transactions.
This means pools could invest reserved blockspace to maintain the protocol, collecting fees from monetary transactions that otherwise would net to 0 being priced out from Layer 1 due to high costs. And to compensate for forgone fees, they could impose higher fees on the inscribers, allowing, or even accelerating, their bubble and making them fight each other for the unprioritized blockspace.
This aligns with a common QoS policy, there is no way nobody though about this before, so I am curious about counterarguments compared to outright transaction censorship.
Capitalism suggests that the highest payer gets included first
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If you have such 'priority mempool/blockspace' feature done, we are in a "one small PR away from censoring unwanted actors" situation.
I'd like to have as much friction as possible for adding censorship to bitcoin. This would be an incremental change toward adding censorship to bitcoin.
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I agree with you to some extent. Let me clarify 3 points:
  1. This policy applies at the pool level, not the protocol level.
  2. Some pools currently block transactions using undisclosed filters, it is not a technical challenge to do so with the current software
  3. QoS manages priorities; it doesn't prevent transactions from going through at some point
If this system becomes a standard solution that fixes the congestion issue, dishonest pools can't use censorship as a pretext for solving problems. I'm not suggesting that there are currently pools engaging in this behavior, but I believe the overton window has been opened.
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