Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Playing with full-rbf peers for fun and L2s security

From: Antoine Riard <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2022 02:56:14 +0100

> I'd suggest doing that right now, without waiting for the patch to get
merged,
> as it improves the politics of getting the patch merged. Miners tend to
run
> customized bitcoind's anyway.

Philosophically, I think we're better off arguing code patches free from a
political framework and rather reasoning from scientific or engineering
principles. If a change is adopted it should be in the name of making the
whole system better, making the new situation a win-win game.

That said, and more pragmatically, now that the full-rbf patch is merged in
Core there is the pedagogical work of explaining the fee upsides of turning
on full-rbf setting to enough miners. AFAIK, we don't have public,
broadcast-all communication channels between developers and mining
operators to exchange on software upgrades (e.g Stratum V2). I think I'm
left with the process of reaching out to miner one by one.

Le jeu. 23 juin 2022 à 20:13, Peter Todd <[email-masked]> a écrit :

> On Tue, Jun 21, 2022 at 07:45:48PM -0400, Antoine Riard wrote:
> > > BTW I changed one of my OTS calendars to issue fee-bumping txs without
> the
> > > opt-in RBF flag set as an experiment. I also made sure txs would
> > propagate to
> > > the above node. As of right now, it's up to 32 replacements (once per
> > block),
> > > without any of them mined; the calendars use the strategy of starting
> at
> > the
> > > minimum possible fee, and bumping the fee up every time a new block
> > arrives
> > > without the tx getting mined. So that's evidence we don't have much
> > full-rbf
> > > hash power at this moment.
> > >
> > > You can see the current status at:
> > https://alice.btc.calendar.opentimestamps.org/
> >
> > That's interesting. I'm not sure if we can conclude of the absence of
> > full-rbf hash power at this moment, as it could also be a lack of
> full-rbf
> > propagation path towards such potential hash power. I think the day we
> see
> > an opt-out replacement transaction mined, it would constitute a good hint
> > of full-rbf hash power (assuming the tx-relay topology stays relatively
> > stable across the transaction issuance...)
>
> Fees are relatively low right now, so there could be 1% or so of full-rbf
> hash
> power and I wouldn't notice with this particular technique as the initial
> tx
> gets mined within 10-20 blocks; a few years back similar experiments were
> finding a few percentage points of hashing power running full-rbf.
>
> > Anyway, if/when the `fullrbf` patch lands in Bitcoin Core, including
> > automatic outbound connections to few `NODE_REPLACE_BY_FEE` peers, I'm
> > thinking of reaching out to a few mining node operators to advocate them
> > with the new policy setting.
>
> I'd suggest doing that right now, without waiting for the patch to get
> merged,
> as it improves the politics of getting the patch merged. Miners tend to run
> customized bitcoind's anyway.
>
> --
> https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
>