The main Bitcoin software lowered the minimum relay costs by default for transactions, marking one of the most important changes of the years for the economic movement of funds through the network.
Bitcoin Core 29.1, published on September 4, defines the minimum default relay rate rate at 100 Satoshis per thousand virtual bytes (0.1 SATS / VB), a reduction of 90% compared to the previous defect rate of 1 SAT / VB. Users pay their costs in Satoshis (the smallest Bitcoin unit) multiplied by the size of their transaction.
Although each individual node operator can modify this parameter, most should stick to the default value. The nodes do not relay and mainly ignore transactions with costs below the value they set for the minimum relay costs rate.
The decision to modify Bitcoin Core developers on August 15 “in response to Bitcoin exchange rate changes over the past 10 years.” The proposal indicated that minimal costs are a rule of protection against service denial attacks (back), but suggested that with the now considerably higher prices, costs lower than Bitcoin (BTC) are acceptable.
Adoption should take place slowly
According to Bitref data, more than 72.5% of all Bitcoin nodes (18,811) run the Bitcoin Core node software, and Bitcoin nodes of almost 27.25% remaining, a fork of Bitcoin Core software has focused on the warranty of more user control. A deeper analysis revealed that the most popular node software is Bitcoin Core 29, with 4,510 knots representing more than 18% of the network.
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This is followed by 3 991 Bitcoin Core 28.1 nodes (almost 16%) and 3,083 Bitcoin knots 29.1 knots (12.31%). Only 571 knots run Bitcoin Core 29.1, which represents less than 2.3% of the network.
While Bitcoin Knots 29.1 is based on Bitcoin Core 29.1, it does not inherit its new faults. Instead, with this update, Knots decided to “make most of the strategy options configurable in the Gui options and add the” Corepolicy “option to use Bitcoin kernel defects.”
The majority of the 571 Bitcoin knots running Bitcoin Core 29.1 and a difficult part to predict nodes of 3,083 Bitcoin 29.1 nodes probably perform the minimum and lower minimum relay costs policy.
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The community reacts to the lower costs
A Bitcoin’s basic developer, Gloria Zhao, said that change is also motivated by a recent trend in which the cheaper transactions than the previous limit are exploited in both cases. Indeed, although the default value has been defined in one direction, node operators have been authorized to execute the value they prefer.
This caused problems, because “the blocks with a lot of sub1SAT / VB transactions do not propagate so quickly to the nodes which have rejected or have not heard of these transactions earlier.” However, to keep the network protected against spam and back attacks, Zhao stressed the need to avoid making the default too cheap, but always lower to avoid the problems of block relay described.
Bitcoin Network Data Service Mempool.Space also pleaded for the costs below, advising users not to pay too much for the space they use on the blockchain. “0.1 Sat / VB is the new SAT / VB,” he wrote in a post in mid-July X.
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