An Incentive Mechanism for Sustainable Blockchain Storage

Miners in a blockchain system are suffering from ever-increasing storage costs, which general have not been properly compensated by the users’ transaction fees. This reduces incentives for miners’ participation and may jeopardize security. To mitigate this insufficient fee issue, we propose Fee Waiting Tax (FWT) mechanism, explicitly considers two types of negative externalities system. Specifically, model interactions between protocol designer, users, miners as three-stage Stackelberg game. By characterizing equilibrium game, find that neglecting externality selection cause they willing to accept insufficient-fee transactions. leads issue existing (i.e., deployed Bitcoin Ethereum). Moreover, our proposed optimal FWT mechanism can motivate users pay sufficient fees cover costs achieve unconstrained social optimum. Numerical results show guarantees achieves an average welfare improvement 51.43% or more over protocol. Furthermore, waiting time low-fee transactions all 68.49% 61.56%, respectively.