I like the idea!
- The opportunity to hedge some of the risk associated with blockchain bloat (rising fees) adds value to bitcoin businesses.
- It’s in line with Counterparty’s vision as a peer to peer financial platform
- A valuable use case for XCP
- Implementing it is not that difficult
- Using it eliminates 3rd party risk
Here’s one way to implement it:
An oracle will every 12 blocks broadcast the median fee of the previous 12 blocks. The oracle is built into the protocol, so this is fully automated.
An even better solution could be to have the oracle cycle through several metrics, e.g. median fee, median block size, uniform random number.
To add this in the best way we should also
- Introduce a new bet type; greater/not greater. Now we only have equal/not equal
- Now the bettor must send dust to the oracle, about $0.15. Better include the oracle address in op_return (same optimization as it done with send transactions)
- Include a relevant module in Counterwallet (I have made one for Countertools, pretty straight forward)