public inbox for bitcoindev@googlegroups.com
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: "David A. Harding" <dave@dtrt•org>
To: Eric Voskuil <eric@voskuil•org>,
	Bitcoin Protocol Discussion
	<bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Scaling Lightning Safely With Feerate-Dependent Timelocks
Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2023 14:37:14 -1000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <786297315b27fdecc1a21cc40ef4b993@dtrt.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <8656E5B3-EDC7-4C00-93AB-C61AC6C22563@voskuil.org>

On 2023-12-28 08:42, Eric Voskuil via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Assuming a “sufficient fraction” of
> one of several economically rational behaviors is a design flaw.

The amount of effort it takes a user to pay additional miners out of
band is likely to increase much faster than probability that the user's
payment will confirm on time.  For example, offering payment to the set
of miners that controls 90% of hash rate will result in confirmation
within 6 blocks 99.9999% of the time, meaning it's probably not worth
putting any effort into offering payment to the other 10% of miners.  If
out of band payments become a significant portion of mining revenue via
a mechanism that results in small miners making significantly less
revenue than large miners, there will be an incentive to centralize
mining even more than it is today.  The more centralized mining is, the
less resistant Bitcoin is to transaction censorship.

We can't prevent people from paying out of band, but we can ensure that
the easiest and most effective way to pay for a transaction is through
in-band fees and transactions that are relayed to every miner who is
interested in them.  If we fail at that, I think Bitcoin losing its
censorship resistance will be inevitable.  LN, coinpools, and channel
factories all strongly depend on Bitcoin transactions not being
censored, so I don't think any security is lost by redesigning them to
additionally depend on reasonably accurate in-band fee statistics.

Miners mining their own transactions, accepting the occasional
out-of-band fee, or having varying local transaction selection policies
are situations that are easily addressed by the user of fee-dependent
timelocks choosing a long window and setting the dependent feerate well
below the maximum feerate they are willing to pay.

-Dave


  reply	other threads:[~2023-12-30  0:37 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 13+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2023-12-14 17:07 jlspc
2023-12-17 23:01 ` Antoine Riard
2023-12-22  1:25   ` jlspc
2023-12-23  4:09     ` Eric Voskuil
2023-12-28 18:19       ` jlspc
2023-12-28 18:42         ` Eric Voskuil
2023-12-30  0:37           ` David A. Harding [this message]
2023-12-30  1:17             ` Nagaev Boris
2023-12-30  3:11               ` David A. Harding
2023-12-30  3:20                 ` Nagaev Boris
2023-12-22 16:36 ` Nagaev Boris
2023-12-28 18:06   ` jlspc
2023-12-29 18:11     ` David A. Harding

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=786297315b27fdecc1a21cc40ef4b993@dtrt.org \
    --to=dave@dtrt$(echo .)org \
    --cc=bitcoin-dev@lists$(echo .)linuxfoundation.org \
    --cc=eric@voskuil$(echo .)org \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox