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

[Sjors Provoost <sjors@sprovoost.nl>]

> Op 5 mei 2025, om 23:34 heeft Peter Todd <pete@petertodd.org> het volgende geschreven:
> 
> 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.

[...]

> Weak blocks give an advantage to large miners.

[..]

> 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.

On the one hand it allows big miners to get these non-standard transactions propagated early, so that their actual blocks don't get delayed.

On the other hand, as soon as they do that, any other miner can run off with the on chain fees. But that would then encourage out-of-band fees (even more).

There's an attribution problem, but although the weak blocks don't end up in the blockchain, they're still pretty good proof that a miner performed the requested service of (at least) spreading the transaction.

Perhaps weak blocks are only a good thing if they're linked in a chain, like in p2pool. They might work for individual pools internally (small, well connected?), but not for the global system.

- Sjors 

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