Re: [bitcoin-dev] [Pre-BIP] Fee Accounts

From: Jeremy <jlrubin@mit•edu>
To: Billy Tetrud <billy.tetrud@gmail•com>
Cc: Bitcoin Protocol Discussion
	<bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org>,
	lightning-dev <lightning-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] [Pre-BIP] Fee Accounts
Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2022 18:51:42 -0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAD5xwhjUkey+VD=u+69+5eirLCCoLgDgAR_4d20hwHo-eyZr6w@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAGpPWDaQAxEfyFs_g9p=PTUNAkSiQKwPiHJbBaLmzfNTjFeucA@mail.gmail.com>

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 10224 bytes --]

The issue with sighash flags is that because you make transactions third
party malleable it becomes possible to bundle and unbundle transactions.

This means there are circumstances where an attacker could e.g. see your
txn, and then add a lot of junk change/inputs + 25 descendants and strongly
anchor your transaction to the bottom of the mempool.

because of rbf rules requiring more fee and feerate, this means you have to
bump across the whole package and that can get really messy.

more generally speaking, you could imagine a future where mempools track
many alternative things that might want to be in a transaction.

suppose there are N inputs each with a weight and an amount of fee being
added and the sighash flags let me pick any subset of them. However, for a
txn to be standard it must be < 100k bytes and for it to be consensus <
1mb. Now it is possible you have to solve a knapsack problem in order to
rationally bundle this transaction out of all possibilities.

This problem can get even thornier, suppose that the inputs I'm adding
themselves are the outputs of another txn in the mempool, now i have to
track and propagate the feerates of that child back up to the parent txn
and track all these dependencies.

perhaps with very careful engineering these issues can be tamed. however it
seems with sponsors or fee accounts, by separating the pays-for from the
participates-in concerns we can greatly simplify it to something like:
compute effective feerate for a txn, including all sponsors that pay more
than the feerate of the base txn. Mine that txn and it's subsidies using
the normal algo. If you run out of space, all subsidies are same-sized so
just take the ones that pay the highest amount up until the added marginal
feerate is less than the next eligible txn.

--
@JeremyRubin <https://twitter.com/JeremyRubin>
<https://twitter.com/JeremyRubin>

On Tue, Jan 18, 2022 at 6:38 PM Billy Tetrud <billy.tetrud@gmail•com> wrote:

> I see, its not primarily to make it cheaper to append fees, but also
> allows appending fees in cases that aren't possible now. Is that right? I
> can certainly see the benefit of a more general way to add a fee to any
> transaction, regardless of whether you're related to that transaction or
> not.
>
> How would you compare the pros and cons of your account-based approach to
> something like a new sighash flag? Eg a sighash flag that says "I'm signing
> this transaction, but the signature is only valid if mined in the same
> block as transaction X (or maybe transactions LIST)". This could be named
> SIGHASH_EXTERNAL. Doing this would be a lot more similar to other bitcoin
> transactions, and no special account would need to be created. Any
> transaction could specify this. At least that's the first thought I would
> have in designing a way to arbitrarily bump fees. Have you compared your
> solution to something more familiar like that?
>
> On Tue, Jan 18, 2022 at 11:43 AM Jeremy <jlrubin@mit•edu> wrote:
>
>> Can you clarify what you mean by "improve the situation"?
>>
>> There's a potential mild bytes savings, but the bigger deal is that the
>> API should be much less vulnerable to pinning issues, fix dust leakage for
>> eltoo like protocols, and just generally allow protocol designs to be fully
>> abstracted from paying fees. You can't easily mathematically quantify API
>> improvements like that.
>> --
>> @JeremyRubin <https://twitter.com/JeremyRubin>
>> <https://twitter.com/JeremyRubin>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 18, 2022 at 8:13 AM Billy Tetrud <billy.tetrud@gmail•com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Do you have any back-of-the-napkin math on quantifying how much this
>>> would improve the situation vs existing methods (eg cpfp)?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Jan 1, 2022 at 2:04 PM Jeremy via bitcoin-dev <
>>> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Happy new years devs,
>>>>
>>>> I figured I would share some thoughts for conceptual review that have
>>>> been bouncing around my head as an opportunity to clean up the fee paying
>>>> semantics in bitcoin "for good". The design space is very wide on the
>>>> approach I'll share, so below is just a sketch of how it could work which
>>>> I'm sure could be improved greatly.
>>>>
>>>> Transaction fees are an integral part of bitcoin.
>>>>
>>>> However, due to quirks of Bitcoin's transaction design, fees are a part
>>>> of the transactions that they occur in.
>>>>
>>>> While this works in a "Bitcoin 1.0" world, where all transactions are
>>>> simple on-chain transfers, real world use of Bitcoin requires support for
>>>> things like Fee Bumping stuck transactions, DoS resistant Payment Channels,
>>>> and other long lived Smart Contracts that can't predict future fee rates.
>>>> Having the fees paid in band makes writing these contracts much more
>>>> difficult as you can't merely express the logic you want for the
>>>> transaction, but also the fees.
>>>>
>>>> Previously, I proposed a special type of transaction called a "Sponsor"
>>>> which has some special consensus + mempool rules to allow arbitrarily
>>>> appending fees to a transaction to bump it up in the mempool.
>>>>
>>>> As an alternative, we could establish an account system in Bitcoin as
>>>> an "extension block".
>>>>
>>>> *Here's how it might work:*
>>>>
>>>> 1. Define a special anyone can spend output type that is a "fee
>>>> account" (e.g. segwit V2). Such outputs have a redeeming key and an amount
>>>> associated with them, but are overall anyone can spend.
>>>> 2. All deposits to these outputs get stored in a separate UTXO database
>>>> for fee accounts
>>>> 3. Fee accounts can sign only two kinds of transaction: A: a fee amount
>>>> and a TXID (or Outpoint?); B: a withdraw amount, a fee, and an address
>>>> 4. These transactions are committed in an extension block merkle tree.
>>>> While the actual signature must cover the TXID/Outpoint, the committed data
>>>> need only cover the index in the block of the transaction. The public key
>>>> for account lookup can be recovered from the message + signature.
>>>> 5. In any block, any of the fee account deposits can be: released into
>>>> fees if there is a corresponding tx; consolidated together to reduce the
>>>> number of utxos (this can be just an OP_TRUE no metadata needed); or
>>>> released into fees *and paid back* into the requested withdrawal key
>>>> (encumbering a 100 block timeout). Signatures must be unique in a block.
>>>> 6. Mempool logic is updated to allow attaching of account fee spends to
>>>> transactions, the mempool can restrict that an account is not allowed more
>>>> spend more than it's balance.
>>>>
>>>> *But aren't accounts "bad"?*
>>>>
>>>> Yes, accounts are bad. But these accounts are not bad, because any
>>>> funds withdrawn from the fee extension are fundamentally locked for 100
>>>> blocks as a coinbase output, so there should be no issues with any series
>>>> of reorgs. Further, since there is no "rich state" for these accounts, the
>>>> state updates can always be applied in a conflict-free way in any order.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> *Improving the privacy of this design:*
>>>>
>>>> This design could likely be modified to implement something like
>>>> Tornado.cash or something else so that the fee account paying can be
>>>> unlinked from the transaction being paid for, improving privacy at the
>>>> expense of being a bit more expensive.
>>>>
>>>> Other operations could be added to allow a trustless mixing to be done
>>>> by miners automatically where groups of accounts with similar values are
>>>> trustlessly  split into a common denominator and change, and keys are
>>>> derived via a verifiable stealth address like protocol (so fee balances can
>>>> be discovered by tracing the updates posted). These updates could also be
>>>> produced by individuals rather than miners, and miners could simply honor
>>>> them with better privacy. While a miner generating an update would be able
>>>> to deanonymize their mixes, if you have your account mixed several times by
>>>> independent miners that could potentially add sufficient privacy.
>>>>
>>>> The LN can also be used with PTLCs to, in theory, have another
>>>> individual paid to sponsor a transaction on your behalf only if they reveal
>>>> a valid sig from their fee paying account, although under this model it's
>>>> hard to ensure that the owner doesn't pay a fee and then 'cancel' by
>>>> withdrawing the rest. However, this could be partly solved by using
>>>> reputable fee accounts (reputation could be measured somewhat
>>>> decentralized-ly by longevity of the account and transactions paid for
>>>> historically).
>>>>
>>>> *Scalability*
>>>>
>>>> This design is fundamentally 'decent' for scalability because adding
>>>> fees to a transaction does not require adding inputs or outputs and does
>>>> not require tracking substantial amounts of new state.
>>>>
>>>> Paying someone else to pay for you via the LN also helps make this more
>>>> efficient if the withdrawal issues can be fixed.
>>>>
>>>> *Lightning:*
>>>>
>>>> This type of design works really well for channels because the addition
>>>> of fees to e.g. a channel state does not require any sort of pre-planning
>>>> (e.g. anchors) or transaction flexibility (SIGHASH flags). This sort of
>>>> design is naturally immune to pinning issues since you could offer to pay a
>>>> fee for any TXID and the number of fee adding offers does not need to be
>>>> restricted in the same way the descendant transactions would need to be.
>>>>
>>>> *Without a fork?*
>>>>
>>>> This type of design could be done as a federated network that bribes
>>>> miners -- potentially even retroactively after a block is formed. That
>>>> might be sufficient to prove the concept works before a consensus upgrade
>>>> is deployed, but such an approach does mean there is a centralizing layer
>>>> interfering with normal mining.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Happy new year!!
>>>>
>>>> Jeremy
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> @JeremyRubin <https://twitter.com/JeremyRubin>
>>>> <https://twitter.com/JeremyRubin>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> bitcoin-dev mailing list
>>>> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org
>>>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>>>>
>>>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 20138 bytes --]