  Decentralized cryptocurrencies are payment systems that rely on aligning the
incentives of users and miners to operate correctly and offer a high quality of
service to users. Recent literature studies the mechanism design problem of the
auction serving as a cryptocurrency's transaction fee mechanism (TFM). We find
that a non-myopic modelling of miners falls close to another well-known
problem: that of online buffer management for packet switching. The main
difference is that unlike packets which are of a fixed size throughout their
lifetime, in a financial environment, user preferences (and therefore revenue
extraction) may be time-dependent. We study the competitive ratio guarantees
given a certain discount rate, and show how existing methods from packet
scheduling, which we call "the undiscounted case", perform suboptimally in the
more general discounted setting. Most notably, we find a novel, simple,
memoryless, and optimal deterministic algorithm for the semi-myopic case, when
the discount factor is up to ~0.770018. We also present a randomized algorithm
that achieves better performance than the best possible deterministic
algorithm, for any discount rate.
