Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] Weak blocks give an advantage to large miners

From: "James O'Beirne" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 May 2025 20:42:51 +0000

This analysis excludes two important points:

1. If a small miner has a mempool that is marginally closer to a large
miner's, they will connect blocks found by that miner more quickly, making
their own mining operation more efficient.

2. A small miner benefits from becoming aware of (potentially large,
non-standard, or directly submitted) transactions because they may want to
make use of it in their own block templates for more revenue.

Bandwidth is rarely a limiting factor for template creators (as there are
many more expensive pieces of hardware required to have a competitive
mining operation), and so a miner may very reasonably decide that it's
worth trading some bandwidth (in the form of received weak blocks) for the
prospect of juicing their fee revenue and minimizing tip connection time.

On Mon, May 5, 2025 at 11:36 PM Peter Todd <[email-masked]> wrote:

> On Mon, May 05, 2025 at 07:18:57PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > I meant to mention this last email, but had forgotten where to find
> > the link. Personally, I think Greg's "relay extra transactions via weak
> > blocks" idea [0] from a year ago is an approach that should be considered
> > here. The TLDR is that if there are miners out there with different
> > relay policies than your node that are accepting transactions you'll
> > reject (eg, lower fee, new tx versions, more complicated dependencies,
> > ...) then once they find a relatively high PoW share, have the network
> > relay that as a weak compact block, with full round-trips to gather
> > any transactions that weren't in your mempool and add those txs to your
> > extra pool to help with block reconstruction in the near future.
> >
> > [0] https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/second-look-at-weak-blocks/805/1
>
> Weak blocks give an advantage to large miners. Small miners, who rarely
> find blocks, are also going to rarely find weak blocks, making the
> feature mostly useless for them in terms of their choice of
> transactions, while simultaneously increasing bandwidth consumption
> somewhat. Meanwhile large miners do find weak blocks often, making the
> feature useful for them and making it even easier for them to profit by
> including non-standard transactions. Which again, is something that
> small miners can't do.
>
> --
> https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
>
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>

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