Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] Censorship Resistant Transaction Relay - Taking out the garbage(man)

From: Sjors Provoost <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2025 15:29:17 +0200

Hi Chris,

I'm replying to a few points that matter imo.

> Again, as I tried to emphasize in my prior message, the goal is not to censor; the goal is to rate-limit spam.

.
The tooling you're building is dual-use at best, and from a miner point of view it's censorship.

>> Then all you've achieved is an incentive to submit directly to miners, making those miners more profitable. Congrats, you didn't fix spam, you didn't rate limit anything and you made mining more centralised.
> 
> 
> Again, if miners are doing this, then they are hostile. If >50% of miners are hostile, then we need to know right now because Nakamoto Consensus falls apart if >50% of the hashrate is dishonest.

Miners are simply following their incentives. It's merely your opinion that this is "hostile". The people who share your opinion have not presented a credible way of enforcing it. All they've achieved is collateral damage.

> Is your concern that the USG would spin up a bunch of GM nodes that don't relay transactions from OFAC addresses? 

No, they would take down the entire mempool by spinning up a million well connected fake nodes that behave in the same way your project does, except they drop *all* transactions. Since there's no financial incentive for users to run nodes, it'll be hard to counter this attack by merely spinning up more nodes.

> >You speak of "rate limiting", but delaying propagation doesn't rate limit anything. Unless you completely block some percentage of transactions, the same amount of spam ends up in blocks, just a little bit later. The rate, e.g. gigabytes per months, stays the same.
> 
> Again, this is simply incorrect. Spam does not have inelastic demand.
> [...]
> If a certain percentage of the hashrate is confirming spam, let's say 20%,

No, 100% will be confirming spam and nothing happens to the fee rate. Elasticity isn't an issue here.

Where does your 20% figure come from? Is that based on your assumption they are not "hostile" and would just go along with not receiving the extra revenue if your sybil nodes block it? 

But why would 80% of miners throw away fee revenue? They won't, so both transaction makers and miners will go around your "rate limiting".

The thing that is concerning here is that they'll use centralised transaction submission services for this, and any miner that doesn't join such service loses revenue and goes out of business.

> >Whereas proponents of filters are (so far) not willing to invest serious money.
> 
> I wouldn't be so sure about that.

You're not providing any evidence to the contrary.

And again, Ocean Pool proactively added the "Core" template after they got pushback from customers for only offering Knots with filtering. After v30 that template will allow unlimited OP_RETURN. Perhaps they'll drop it then, but so far they haven't put a cent of revenue at risk.

> >Or people can just spin up more Libre Relay nodes.
> 
> Who are these people? Altcoiners?? Yeah, right. Anyway, we can just spin up more GM nodes.

This comes back to question of budget. Miners and scammers have budget for relay infrastructure. You can of course try to outspend them, with your own money or a rich donor. If you sustain that effort long enough, it may be cheaper for them to use centralised submission services. Which as others have pointed out is very bad.

- Sjors

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