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theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 3 days agoCryptocurrency has transaction fees. They start out as the newly mined coins, paid from the pool of unmined coins. Once the finite number of coins have been mined and that pool is empty, the miners will begin charge fees for each transaction directly to the users making the transactions.
dhork@lemmy.world 3 days ago
No, that’s not quite how it works.
Calling the newly minted coins a transaction fee “paid from the pool of unmined coins” isn’t really accurate, as those coins didn’t exist until they were mined. The algorithm carefully controls how many new coins are made.
But miners do not set fees at all. Users set their fee when they make their transactions, and miners pick which transactions they want to attempt to validate. We expect miners will pick the transactions with the highest fee per byte, because they want to increase their reward if they manage to find a block. But they don’t have to, and they may have reasons to pick other transactions.
The whole point of it being trustless is that no party needs to coordinate. Users create transactions, miners validate them.