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Comment by akerro | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible to setup mining pool that would do only confirmations?

That's what a mining pool is. There is no other type of mining pool.

The purpose of mining is to find valid blocks to add to the blockchain. A transaction is "confirmed" when it is part of a block in a blockchain that has some number of blocks after it. The number of blocks after it is the number of confirmations the transaction is considered to have.

Don't mining pools concentrate on mining new blocks, as it's more profitable? Can't we have a mining pool with old ASIC/GPU miner that would do ONLY confirmations, and would do all confirmations, even those with minimal fee?

Transactions are confirmed through the mining of new blocks. There is no other way to confirm transactions, and it's the purpose of block-mining.

Ah, ok thanks. SO the only way to fix it is by deploying new miners.

If you deploy more miners the average difficult to mine each block will increase (as for the bitcoin rules) so you are back to square one.

Yup, I expected this.

The way to fix this is increasing the size of the blocks, which is trivial from a technical standpoint, but it has some implications that the current majority of miners are not willing to accept.

No that wouldn't actually fix it. There is a limit to how many transactions can be processed regardless of how many miners are running. Adding more miners doesn't actually increase capacity just the difficulty.

The new blocks are the incentive for the confirmations to be accomplished. There are no "types" of mining, afaik.

> The new blocks are the incentive for the confirmations to be accomplished.

Not quite. The new blocks are the confirmations.

> There are no "types" of mining, afaik.

Right.

As others have said "mining" is really not a good name for what is happening. What the miners are really doing is the work that is necessary to confirm and secure the transactions.

When they do that, if they are the first miner to come up with the values required to confirm the transaction they are allowed to add a transaction of their own which "transfers" some bitcoins from "nowhere" to them, thus getting rewarded for their work. it is this that incentivizes people to "mine" but it's not the purpose.

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