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I just found this gem - Discouraged Block. It proposes a method where miners "will" (are requested to?) ignore chains with certain blocks at the tip.

It's not like anyone can dictate the behavior of all miners, but if large parts of the network choose this discouragement strategy, then it becomes unprofitable for any single miner not to join in.

Are any current miners/pools for or against this discouragement policy (currently, the only policy is "ignore forks where the coinbase of the block at the tip does not contain the block height")?

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  • That is an interesting mechanism. The official client has a set of rules that blocks should follow, but even if a certain block does not follow a given rule, it is considered okay if at least 20% of recent blocks also did not follow the rule. This allows for rules to be abandoned if they turn out to be bad without updating a majority of the client code. You'd only need a majority (80%) to put in new rules.
    – Thilo
    Commented Feb 18, 2012 at 2:00

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I suspect what will happen is that most of the mining pools will use the official client, and so will use the discouragement policy as set by Gavin et al. This will make it in each pool's best interest to not have their blocks be discouraged.

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