[bitcoin-dev] Tuesday’s IRC workshop on L2 onchain support

[bitcoin-dev] Tuesday’s IRC workshop on L2 onchain support

[Michael Folkson]

The workshop was previously announced by ariard on the bitcoin-dev
mailing list here:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-April/018841.html

A reminder was posted to the bitcoin-dev mailing list here:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-June/019068.html

The conversation log for the workshop is here:
https://gist.github.com/ariard/5f28dffe82ddad763b346a2344092ba4

I’ll summarize what was discussed during the meeting but please refer
to the L2 zoology repo ariard has set up for background context and
additional notes: https://github.com/ariard/L2-zoology

General considerations

I think it is worth first reiterating the obvious that there will
never be perfect security guarantees on network transaction fee rates
or transaction relay. Network fee rates can in theory go up to
anything (upper limit of infinity) and will always to some degree be
inherently unpredictable. In addition transaction acceptance can never
be guaranteed even if you attempt a direct connection to a miner. At
the same time L2 protocols (e.g. Lightning and DLCs) elevate
transaction propagation and inclusion in a time sensitive mined block
to a security assumption from what used to just be a usability
assumption (BlueMatt). Within those confines these workshops are
attempting to strengthen that security assumption knowing that
guaranteeing it is out of reach.

There are considerations that blocked transaction propagation isn’t
necessarily a problem for the victim if it is also blocked for the
attacker. In addition some successful attacks present an opportunity
for the victim to divert their funds to miner fees (e.g. scorched
earth) ensuring the attacker doesn’t financially benefit from the
attack (harding). Personally I would argue neither of these present
much assurance to the victim. Out of conservatism one should assume
that the attacker has greater resources than the victim (e.g. a direct
line to a miner) and knowing a victim’s lost funds went to the miner
instead of the attacker isn’t of much comfort to the victim (other
than potentially presenting a disincentive for the attack in the first
place). This is obviously further complicated if the miner is the
attacker. In addition any incentive for miners to not mine
transactions to wait for a potential pay-all-to-fee are troubling
(t-bast).

New(ish) ideas

RubenSomsen brought up the idea of fee sensitive timelocks, they would
need a soft fork. ariard briefly discussed the idea of a transaction
relay overlay network. harding stated his opinion that we should be
leaning more on miners’ profit incentive rather than attempting to
normalize mempool policy (e.g.
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2020-April/002664.html).
t-bast raised the prospect of mining pools exposing public APIs to
push them transactions directly.

The impact of changes to Bitcoin Core on L2 protocols

Some changes to Core (e.g. some privacy improvements) can conflict
with the goal of minimizing transaction propagation times.
Chris_Stewart_5 raised the idea of a nightly bitcoind build to give L2
developers a way to write regression tests against the latest builds
of bitcoind. He added that L2 devs should write automated regression
test suites against bitcoind exposed RPC commands. t-bast would like a
bitcoind “evicttx” RPC to remove a transaction from the mempool on
regtest.

Full RBF

In advance of the workshop ariard posted to the mailing list a
proposal for full RBF in a future version of Bitcoin Core:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-June/019074.html

Progress in this direction has been attempted in the past (e.g.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/10823) BlueMatt pointed out
that even with full RBF it is trivial to create mempool partitions. As
long as RBF has a fee rate increase minimum an attacker can trivially
split the mempool by broadcasting two conflicting transactions with
the same fee.

ariard plans to contact businesses (e.g. Lightning onboarding services
relying on zero confirmations) to check that this possible eventual
move to full RBF doesn’t present a problem for them. There could well
be engineering work required in advance of the possible change being
made.

Next week’s meeting

Next week’s meeting (Tuesday 22nd June, 19:00 UTC,
#l2-onchain-support, Libera) will be on fee bumping and package relay
that glozow has recently been working to advance in Bitcoin Core.

-- 
Michael Folkson
Email: michaelfolkson@gmail.com
Keybase: michaelfolkson
PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3

Re: [bitcoin-dev] Tuesday’s IRC workshop on L2 onchain support

[Billy Tetrud]

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Thanks for the Summary Michael!

It seems like fee-sensitive timelocks weren't discussed too much in the
workshop, unless I'm missing something. I also don't see any downside to it
discussed (other than that it needs a soft-fork). It seems like that would
be a great way to substantially increase the resilience of the LN to
temporary periods of fee congestion, even potentially long-running periods
that last weeks. It might even help in non-temporary fee market increases
by giving participants extra time to use some fee-bumping technique to
close or restructure their channels to compensate for the elevated fee
market.

On Thu, Jun 17, 2021 at 1:16 PM Michael Folkson via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> The workshop was previously announced by ariard on the bitcoin-dev
> mailing list here:
>
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-April/018841.html
>
> A reminder was posted to the bitcoin-dev mailing list here:
>
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-June/019068.html
>
> The conversation log for the workshop is here:
> https://gist.github.com/ariard/5f28dffe82ddad763b346a2344092ba4
>
> I’ll summarize what was discussed during the meeting but please refer
> to the L2 zoology repo ariard has set up for background context and
> additional notes: https://github.com/ariard/L2-zoology
>
> General considerations
>
> I think it is worth first reiterating the obvious that there will
> never be perfect security guarantees on network transaction fee rates
> or transaction relay. Network fee rates can in theory go up to
> anything (upper limit of infinity) and will always to some degree be
> inherently unpredictable. In addition transaction acceptance can never
> be guaranteed even if you attempt a direct connection to a miner. At
> the same time L2 protocols (e.g. Lightning and DLCs) elevate
> transaction propagation and inclusion in a time sensitive mined block
> to a security assumption from what used to just be a usability
> assumption (BlueMatt). Within those confines these workshops are
> attempting to strengthen that security assumption knowing that
> guaranteeing it is out of reach.
>
> There are considerations that blocked transaction propagation isn’t
> necessarily a problem for the victim if it is also blocked for the
> attacker. In addition some successful attacks present an opportunity
> for the victim to divert their funds to miner fees (e.g. scorched
> earth) ensuring the attacker doesn’t financially benefit from the
> attack (harding). Personally I would argue neither of these present
> much assurance to the victim. Out of conservatism one should assume
> that the attacker has greater resources than the victim (e.g. a direct
> line to a miner) and knowing a victim’s lost funds went to the miner
> instead of the attacker isn’t of much comfort to the victim (other
> than potentially presenting a disincentive for the attack in the first
> place). This is obviously further complicated if the miner is the
> attacker. In addition any incentive for miners to not mine
> transactions to wait for a potential pay-all-to-fee are troubling
> (t-bast).
>
> New(ish) ideas
>
> RubenSomsen brought up the idea of fee sensitive timelocks, they would
> need a soft fork. ariard briefly discussed the idea of a transaction
> relay overlay network. harding stated his opinion that we should be
> leaning more on miners’ profit incentive rather than attempting to
> normalize mempool policy (e.g.
>
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2020-April/002664.html
> ).
> t-bast raised the prospect of mining pools exposing public APIs to
> push them transactions directly.
>
> The impact of changes to Bitcoin Core on L2 protocols
>
> Some changes to Core (e.g. some privacy improvements) can conflict
> with the goal of minimizing transaction propagation times.
> Chris_Stewart_5 raised the idea of a nightly bitcoind build to give L2
> developers a way to write regression tests against the latest builds
> of bitcoind. He added that L2 devs should write automated regression
> test suites against bitcoind exposed RPC commands. t-bast would like a
> bitcoind “evicttx” RPC to remove a transaction from the mempool on
> regtest.
>
> Full RBF
>
> In advance of the workshop ariard posted to the mailing list a
> proposal for full RBF in a future version of Bitcoin Core:
>
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-June/019074.html
>
> Progress in this direction has been attempted in the past (e.g.
> https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/10823) BlueMatt pointed out
> that even with full RBF it is trivial to create mempool partitions. As
> long as RBF has a fee rate increase minimum an attacker can trivially
> split the mempool by broadcasting two conflicting transactions with
> the same fee.
>
> ariard plans to contact businesses (e.g. Lightning onboarding services
> relying on zero confirmations) to check that this possible eventual
> move to full RBF doesn’t present a problem for them. There could well
> be engineering work required in advance of the possible change being
> made.
>
> Next week’s meeting
>
> Next week’s meeting (Tuesday 22nd June, 19:00 UTC,
> #l2-onchain-support, Libera) will be on fee bumping and package relay
> that glozow has recently been working to advance in Bitcoin Core.
>
> --
> Michael Folkson
> Email: michaelfolkson@gmail.com
> Keybase: michaelfolkson
> PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>

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Re: [bitcoin-dev] Tuesday’s IRC workshop on L2 onchain support

[Michael Folkson]

Hey Billy

No, fee sensitive timelocks weren't discussed at any length in the
workshop. The workshops are obviously time limited but if they spur
future discussion and drafted proposals (whether they need soft forks
or not) outside of the workshops that would be great. This idea was
raised in the meeting by Ruben Somsen so maybe Ruben has given them
some thought. Making timelocks conditional on the current fee rate
seems challenging to me (where is the current network fee rate
obtained from and how is it fed into the script?) but I haven't
sketched out exactly how they would work.

A reminder that the second workshop (on package relay and fee bumping)
starts at 19:00 UTC today (30 minutes after I've sent this, there may
be a delay before it is published to the mailing list).

Thanks
Michael

On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 7:02 PM Billy Tetrud <billy.tetrud@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks for the Summary Michael!
>
> It seems like fee-sensitive timelocks weren't discussed too much in the workshop, unless I'm missing something. I also don't see any downside to it discussed (other than that it needs a soft-fork). It seems like that would be a great way to substantially increase the resilience of the LN to temporary periods of fee congestion, even potentially long-running periods that last weeks. It might even help in non-temporary fee market increases by giving participants extra time to use some fee-bumping technique to close or restructure their channels to compensate for the elevated fee market.
>
> On Thu, Jun 17, 2021 at 1:16 PM Michael Folkson via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>>
>> The workshop was previously announced by ariard on the bitcoin-dev
>> mailing list here:
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-April/018841.html
>>
>> A reminder was posted to the bitcoin-dev mailing list here:
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-June/019068.html
>>
>> The conversation log for the workshop is here:
>> https://gist.github.com/ariard/5f28dffe82ddad763b346a2344092ba4
>>
>> I’ll summarize what was discussed during the meeting but please refer
>> to the L2 zoology repo ariard has set up for background context and
>> additional notes: https://github.com/ariard/L2-zoology
>>
>> General considerations
>>
>> I think it is worth first reiterating the obvious that there will
>> never be perfect security guarantees on network transaction fee rates
>> or transaction relay. Network fee rates can in theory go up to
>> anything (upper limit of infinity) and will always to some degree be
>> inherently unpredictable. In addition transaction acceptance can never
>> be guaranteed even if you attempt a direct connection to a miner. At
>> the same time L2 protocols (e.g. Lightning and DLCs) elevate
>> transaction propagation and inclusion in a time sensitive mined block
>> to a security assumption from what used to just be a usability
>> assumption (BlueMatt). Within those confines these workshops are
>> attempting to strengthen that security assumption knowing that
>> guaranteeing it is out of reach.
>>
>> There are considerations that blocked transaction propagation isn’t
>> necessarily a problem for the victim if it is also blocked for the
>> attacker. In addition some successful attacks present an opportunity
>> for the victim to divert their funds to miner fees (e.g. scorched
>> earth) ensuring the attacker doesn’t financially benefit from the
>> attack (harding). Personally I would argue neither of these present
>> much assurance to the victim. Out of conservatism one should assume
>> that the attacker has greater resources than the victim (e.g. a direct
>> line to a miner) and knowing a victim’s lost funds went to the miner
>> instead of the attacker isn’t of much comfort to the victim (other
>> than potentially presenting a disincentive for the attack in the first
>> place). This is obviously further complicated if the miner is the
>> attacker. In addition any incentive for miners to not mine
>> transactions to wait for a potential pay-all-to-fee are troubling
>> (t-bast).
>>
>> New(ish) ideas
>>
>> RubenSomsen brought up the idea of fee sensitive timelocks, they would
>> need a soft fork. ariard briefly discussed the idea of a transaction
>> relay overlay network. harding stated his opinion that we should be
>> leaning more on miners’ profit incentive rather than attempting to
>> normalize mempool policy (e.g.
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2020-April/002664.html).
>> t-bast raised the prospect of mining pools exposing public APIs to
>> push them transactions directly.
>>
>> The impact of changes to Bitcoin Core on L2 protocols
>>
>> Some changes to Core (e.g. some privacy improvements) can conflict
>> with the goal of minimizing transaction propagation times.
>> Chris_Stewart_5 raised the idea of a nightly bitcoind build to give L2
>> developers a way to write regression tests against the latest builds
>> of bitcoind. He added that L2 devs should write automated regression
>> test suites against bitcoind exposed RPC commands. t-bast would like a
>> bitcoind “evicttx” RPC to remove a transaction from the mempool on
>> regtest.
>>
>> Full RBF
>>
>> In advance of the workshop ariard posted to the mailing list a
>> proposal for full RBF in a future version of Bitcoin Core:
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-June/019074.html
>>
>> Progress in this direction has been attempted in the past (e.g.
>> https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/10823) BlueMatt pointed out
>> that even with full RBF it is trivial to create mempool partitions. As
>> long as RBF has a fee rate increase minimum an attacker can trivially
>> split the mempool by broadcasting two conflicting transactions with
>> the same fee.
>>
>> ariard plans to contact businesses (e.g. Lightning onboarding services
>> relying on zero confirmations) to check that this possible eventual
>> move to full RBF doesn’t present a problem for them. There could well
>> be engineering work required in advance of the possible change being
>> made.
>>
>> Next week’s meeting
>>
>> Next week’s meeting (Tuesday 22nd June, 19:00 UTC,
>> #l2-onchain-support, Libera) will be on fee bumping and package relay
>> that glozow has recently been working to advance in Bitcoin Core.
>>
>> --
>> Michael Folkson
>> Email: michaelfolkson@gmail.com
>> Keybase: michaelfolkson
>> PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3
>> _______________________________________________
>> bitcoin-dev mailing list
>> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev



-- 
Michael Folkson
Email: michaelfolkson@gmail.com
Keybase: michaelfolkson
PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3

Re: [bitcoin-dev] Tuesday’s IRC workshop on L2 onchain support

[Billy Tetrud]

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>  where is the current network fee rate obtained from and how is it fed
into the script?

It could be obtained as something like the median transaction fee rate over
a window of X blocks. Its something any full node could easily keep track
of. And as long as hour-level or day-level granularity is acceptable, I
wouldn't think there'd be any need to incorporate mempool information (if
that were even possible without introducing new attack vectors). Let me
know if this isn't an appropriate thread to discuss this in.

On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 11:21 AM Michael Folkson <michaelfolkson@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hey Billy
>
> No, fee sensitive timelocks weren't discussed at any length in the
> workshop. The workshops are obviously time limited but if they spur
> future discussion and drafted proposals (whether they need soft forks
> or not) outside of the workshops that would be great. This idea was
> raised in the meeting by Ruben Somsen so maybe Ruben has given them
> some thought. Making timelocks conditional on the current fee rate
> seems challenging to me (where is the current network fee rate
> obtained from and how is it fed into the script?) but I haven't
> sketched out exactly how they would work.
>
> A reminder that the second workshop (on package relay and fee bumping)
> starts at 19:00 UTC today (30 minutes after I've sent this, there may
> be a delay before it is published to the mailing list).
>
> Thanks
> Michael
>
> On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 7:02 PM Billy Tetrud <billy.tetrud@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Thanks for the Summary Michael!
> >
> > It seems like fee-sensitive timelocks weren't discussed too much in the
> workshop, unless I'm missing something. I also don't see any downside to it
> discussed (other than that it needs a soft-fork). It seems like that would
> be a great way to substantially increase the resilience of the LN to
> temporary periods of fee congestion, even potentially long-running periods
> that last weeks. It might even help in non-temporary fee market increases
> by giving participants extra time to use some fee-bumping technique to
> close or restructure their channels to compensate for the elevated fee
> market.
> >
> > On Thu, Jun 17, 2021 at 1:16 PM Michael Folkson via bitcoin-dev <
> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> The workshop was previously announced by ariard on the bitcoin-dev
> >> mailing list here:
> >>
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-April/018841.html
> >>
> >> A reminder was posted to the bitcoin-dev mailing list here:
> >>
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-June/019068.html
> >>
> >> The conversation log for the workshop is here:
> >> https://gist.github.com/ariard/5f28dffe82ddad763b346a2344092ba4
> >>
> >> I’ll summarize what was discussed during the meeting but please refer
> >> to the L2 zoology repo ariard has set up for background context and
> >> additional notes: https://github.com/ariard/L2-zoology
> >>
> >> General considerations
> >>
> >> I think it is worth first reiterating the obvious that there will
> >> never be perfect security guarantees on network transaction fee rates
> >> or transaction relay. Network fee rates can in theory go up to
> >> anything (upper limit of infinity) and will always to some degree be
> >> inherently unpredictable. In addition transaction acceptance can never
> >> be guaranteed even if you attempt a direct connection to a miner. At
> >> the same time L2 protocols (e.g. Lightning and DLCs) elevate
> >> transaction propagation and inclusion in a time sensitive mined block
> >> to a security assumption from what used to just be a usability
> >> assumption (BlueMatt). Within those confines these workshops are
> >> attempting to strengthen that security assumption knowing that
> >> guaranteeing it is out of reach.
> >>
> >> There are considerations that blocked transaction propagation isn’t
> >> necessarily a problem for the victim if it is also blocked for the
> >> attacker. In addition some successful attacks present an opportunity
> >> for the victim to divert their funds to miner fees (e.g. scorched
> >> earth) ensuring the attacker doesn’t financially benefit from the
> >> attack (harding). Personally I would argue neither of these present
> >> much assurance to the victim. Out of conservatism one should assume
> >> that the attacker has greater resources than the victim (e.g. a direct
> >> line to a miner) and knowing a victim’s lost funds went to the miner
> >> instead of the attacker isn’t of much comfort to the victim (other
> >> than potentially presenting a disincentive for the attack in the first
> >> place). This is obviously further complicated if the miner is the
> >> attacker. In addition any incentive for miners to not mine
> >> transactions to wait for a potential pay-all-to-fee are troubling
> >> (t-bast).
> >>
> >> New(ish) ideas
> >>
> >> RubenSomsen brought up the idea of fee sensitive timelocks, they would
> >> need a soft fork. ariard briefly discussed the idea of a transaction
> >> relay overlay network. harding stated his opinion that we should be
> >> leaning more on miners’ profit incentive rather than attempting to
> >> normalize mempool policy (e.g.
> >>
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2020-April/002664.html
> ).
> >> t-bast raised the prospect of mining pools exposing public APIs to
> >> push them transactions directly.
> >>
> >> The impact of changes to Bitcoin Core on L2 protocols
> >>
> >> Some changes to Core (e.g. some privacy improvements) can conflict
> >> with the goal of minimizing transaction propagation times.
> >> Chris_Stewart_5 raised the idea of a nightly bitcoind build to give L2
> >> developers a way to write regression tests against the latest builds
> >> of bitcoind. He added that L2 devs should write automated regression
> >> test suites against bitcoind exposed RPC commands. t-bast would like a
> >> bitcoind “evicttx” RPC to remove a transaction from the mempool on
> >> regtest.
> >>
> >> Full RBF
> >>
> >> In advance of the workshop ariard posted to the mailing list a
> >> proposal for full RBF in a future version of Bitcoin Core:
> >>
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-June/019074.html
> >>
> >> Progress in this direction has been attempted in the past (e.g.
> >> https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/10823) BlueMatt pointed out
> >> that even with full RBF it is trivial to create mempool partitions. As
> >> long as RBF has a fee rate increase minimum an attacker can trivially
> >> split the mempool by broadcasting two conflicting transactions with
> >> the same fee.
> >>
> >> ariard plans to contact businesses (e.g. Lightning onboarding services
> >> relying on zero confirmations) to check that this possible eventual
> >> move to full RBF doesn’t present a problem for them. There could well
> >> be engineering work required in advance of the possible change being
> >> made.
> >>
> >> Next week’s meeting
> >>
> >> Next week’s meeting (Tuesday 22nd June, 19:00 UTC,
> >> #l2-onchain-support, Libera) will be on fee bumping and package relay
> >> that glozow has recently been working to advance in Bitcoin Core.
> >>
> >> --
> >> Michael Folkson
> >> Email: michaelfolkson@gmail.com
> >> Keybase: michaelfolkson
> >> PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> >> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
> >> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>
>
>
> --
> Michael Folkson
> Email: michaelfolkson@gmail.com
> Keybase: michaelfolkson
> PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3
>

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Re: [bitcoin-dev] Tuesday’s IRC workshop on L2 onchain support

[Michael Folkson]

Sure, feel free to continue on this thread for discussion of fee
sensitive timelocks. I'll start a new thread for a summary of today's
second workshop.

On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 7:26 PM Billy Tetrud <billy.tetrud@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >  where is the current network fee rate obtained from and how is it fed into the script?
>
> It could be obtained as something like the median transaction fee rate over a window of X blocks. Its something any full node could easily keep track of. And as long as hour-level or day-level granularity is acceptable, I wouldn't think there'd be any need to incorporate mempool information (if that were even possible without introducing new attack vectors). Let me know if this isn't an appropriate thread to discuss this in.
>
> On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 11:21 AM Michael Folkson <michaelfolkson@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hey Billy
>>
>> No, fee sensitive timelocks weren't discussed at any length in the
>> workshop. The workshops are obviously time limited but if they spur
>> future discussion and drafted proposals (whether they need soft forks
>> or not) outside of the workshops that would be great. This idea was
>> raised in the meeting by Ruben Somsen so maybe Ruben has given them
>> some thought. Making timelocks conditional on the current fee rate
>> seems challenging to me (where is the current network fee rate
>> obtained from and how is it fed into the script?) but I haven't
>> sketched out exactly how they would work.
>>
>> A reminder that the second workshop (on package relay and fee bumping)
>> starts at 19:00 UTC today (30 minutes after I've sent this, there may
>> be a delay before it is published to the mailing list).
>>
>> Thanks
>> Michael
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 7:02 PM Billy Tetrud <billy.tetrud@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > Thanks for the Summary Michael!
>> >
>> > It seems like fee-sensitive timelocks weren't discussed too much in the workshop, unless I'm missing something. I also don't see any downside to it discussed (other than that it needs a soft-fork). It seems like that would be a great way to substantially increase the resilience of the LN to temporary periods of fee congestion, even potentially long-running periods that last weeks. It might even help in non-temporary fee market increases by giving participants extra time to use some fee-bumping technique to close or restructure their channels to compensate for the elevated fee market.
>> >
>> > On Thu, Jun 17, 2021 at 1:16 PM Michael Folkson via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> The workshop was previously announced by ariard on the bitcoin-dev
>> >> mailing list here:
>> >> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-April/018841.html
>> >>
>> >> A reminder was posted to the bitcoin-dev mailing list here:
>> >> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-June/019068.html
>> >>
>> >> The conversation log for the workshop is here:
>> >> https://gist.github.com/ariard/5f28dffe82ddad763b346a2344092ba4
>> >>
>> >> I’ll summarize what was discussed during the meeting but please refer
>> >> to the L2 zoology repo ariard has set up for background context and
>> >> additional notes: https://github.com/ariard/L2-zoology
>> >>
>> >> General considerations
>> >>
>> >> I think it is worth first reiterating the obvious that there will
>> >> never be perfect security guarantees on network transaction fee rates
>> >> or transaction relay. Network fee rates can in theory go up to
>> >> anything (upper limit of infinity) and will always to some degree be
>> >> inherently unpredictable. In addition transaction acceptance can never
>> >> be guaranteed even if you attempt a direct connection to a miner. At
>> >> the same time L2 protocols (e.g. Lightning and DLCs) elevate
>> >> transaction propagation and inclusion in a time sensitive mined block
>> >> to a security assumption from what used to just be a usability
>> >> assumption (BlueMatt). Within those confines these workshops are
>> >> attempting to strengthen that security assumption knowing that
>> >> guaranteeing it is out of reach.
>> >>
>> >> There are considerations that blocked transaction propagation isn’t
>> >> necessarily a problem for the victim if it is also blocked for the
>> >> attacker. In addition some successful attacks present an opportunity
>> >> for the victim to divert their funds to miner fees (e.g. scorched
>> >> earth) ensuring the attacker doesn’t financially benefit from the
>> >> attack (harding). Personally I would argue neither of these present
>> >> much assurance to the victim. Out of conservatism one should assume
>> >> that the attacker has greater resources than the victim (e.g. a direct
>> >> line to a miner) and knowing a victim’s lost funds went to the miner
>> >> instead of the attacker isn’t of much comfort to the victim (other
>> >> than potentially presenting a disincentive for the attack in the first
>> >> place). This is obviously further complicated if the miner is the
>> >> attacker. In addition any incentive for miners to not mine
>> >> transactions to wait for a potential pay-all-to-fee are troubling
>> >> (t-bast).
>> >>
>> >> New(ish) ideas
>> >>
>> >> RubenSomsen brought up the idea of fee sensitive timelocks, they would
>> >> need a soft fork. ariard briefly discussed the idea of a transaction
>> >> relay overlay network. harding stated his opinion that we should be
>> >> leaning more on miners’ profit incentive rather than attempting to
>> >> normalize mempool policy (e.g.
>> >> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2020-April/002664.html).
>> >> t-bast raised the prospect of mining pools exposing public APIs to
>> >> push them transactions directly.
>> >>
>> >> The impact of changes to Bitcoin Core on L2 protocols
>> >>
>> >> Some changes to Core (e.g. some privacy improvements) can conflict
>> >> with the goal of minimizing transaction propagation times.
>> >> Chris_Stewart_5 raised the idea of a nightly bitcoind build to give L2
>> >> developers a way to write regression tests against the latest builds
>> >> of bitcoind. He added that L2 devs should write automated regression
>> >> test suites against bitcoind exposed RPC commands. t-bast would like a
>> >> bitcoind “evicttx” RPC to remove a transaction from the mempool on
>> >> regtest.
>> >>
>> >> Full RBF
>> >>
>> >> In advance of the workshop ariard posted to the mailing list a
>> >> proposal for full RBF in a future version of Bitcoin Core:
>> >> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-June/019074.html
>> >>
>> >> Progress in this direction has been attempted in the past (e.g.
>> >> https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/10823) BlueMatt pointed out
>> >> that even with full RBF it is trivial to create mempool partitions. As
>> >> long as RBF has a fee rate increase minimum an attacker can trivially
>> >> split the mempool by broadcasting two conflicting transactions with
>> >> the same fee.
>> >>
>> >> ariard plans to contact businesses (e.g. Lightning onboarding services
>> >> relying on zero confirmations) to check that this possible eventual
>> >> move to full RBF doesn’t present a problem for them. There could well
>> >> be engineering work required in advance of the possible change being
>> >> made.
>> >>
>> >> Next week’s meeting
>> >>
>> >> Next week’s meeting (Tuesday 22nd June, 19:00 UTC,
>> >> #l2-onchain-support, Libera) will be on fee bumping and package relay
>> >> that glozow has recently been working to advance in Bitcoin Core.
>> >>
>> >> --
>> >> Michael Folkson
>> >> Email: michaelfolkson@gmail.com
>> >> Keybase: michaelfolkson
>> >> PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3
>> >> _______________________________________________
>> >> bitcoin-dev mailing list
>> >> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
>> >> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Michael Folkson
>> Email: michaelfolkson@gmail.com
>> Keybase: michaelfolkson
>> PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3



-- 
Michael Folkson
Email: michaelfolkson@gmail.com
Keybase: michaelfolkson
PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3