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"The compensation paid to validators derives from users’ transaction fees, which must therefore be sufficiently high to attract enough honest validators to keep the ledger running. So ledgers throttle transaction throughput by design, creating congestion and so increasing users’ willingness to pay fees to avoid it."

Hmm. It's certainly true that validators need to be compensated enough to keep the ledger running. Their payment does come from transaction fees, but it also comes in the form of newly created (mined) coins.

In a proof-of-work system (i.e. permissionless/trustless blockchains) sufficient incentive means roughly that the compensation (block reward) exceeds the cost of the electricity needed to mine the block.

It's not clear to me that getting the validator incentives right implies that a ledger would *have to* "throttle transaction throughput" by design.

From the BIS article:

"Achieving sufficiently high rewards requires the maximum number of transactions per block to be limited."

I'm not sure why this would necessarily have to be the case. As a validator, if you could include more transactions in your block, you'd get yourself more transaction fees. Would allowing unlimited transactions somehow cause validators to run away? I don't see why it would. Maybe I'm missing something?

Also from the BIS article, but unrelated:

"Smart contracts were made possible by the development of Ethereum, the first major blockchain that allowed for programmability."

This is not true. Bitcoin has smart contracts. A difference is that Ethereum allows you to write loops whereas Bitcoin script doesn't.

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