Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] death to the mempool, long live the mempool

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2021 16:01:51 -0400

On Tue, Oct 26, 2021 at 07:44:45PM -0400, Antoine Riard via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Such a list of endpoints couldn't be static otherwise it's an artificial
> barrier to enter in the mining competition, and as such a centralization
> vector. Dynamic, trust-minimized discovery of the mining endpoints assumes
> an address-relay network, of which the robustness must be high enough
> against sophisticated sybil attacks. One current defense mechanism in core
> to achieve that is selecting outbound peers based in different /16 subnets
> as it's harder for an attacker to obtain IP addresses. Replicating this
> mechanism for the mining endpoints binds the mining topology to the
> Internet one, which is downgrading the mining competition.

I think a really simple way to put it is if we didn't have the mempool, it'd be
good to create a free service that got transactions to miners in an equal
opportunity, decentralized, way. A simple flood fill scheme would be a great
way to do that... at which point you've re-invented the mempool.

Nothing wrong with people running nodes that opt-out of transaction
broadcasting, and it may even make sense for such nodes to preferentially peer
with each other. But there's always going to be a need for a scheme like the
existing mempool, so might as well just keep it.

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org