  The Bitcoin payment system involves two agent types: Users that transact with
the currency and pay fees and miners in charge of authorizing transactions and
securing the system in return for these fees. Two of Bitcoin's challenges are
(i) securing sufficient miner revenues as block rewards decrease, and (ii)
alleviating the throughput limitation due to a small maximal block size cap.
These issues are strongly related as increasing the maximal block size may
decrease revenue due to Bitcoin's pay-your-bid approach. To decouple them, we
analyze the "monopolistic auction", showing: (i) its revenue does not decrease
as the maximal block size increases, (ii) it is resilient to an untrusted
auctioneer (the miner), and (iii) simplicity for transaction issuers (bidders),
as the average gain from strategic bid shading (relative to bidding one's
value) diminishes as the number of bids increases.
