Re: [bitcoin-dev] Does Bitcoin require or have an honest majority or a rational one? (re rbf)

[Peter Todd <pete@petertodd.org>]

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On Tue, Oct 18, 2022 at 10:30:26AM -0400, Russell O'Connor via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> It is most certainly the case that one can construct situations where not
> mining on the tip is going to be the prefered strategy.  But even if that
> happens on occasion, it's not like the protocol immediately collapses,
> because mining off the tip is indistinguishable from being a high latency
> miner who simply didn't receive the most work block in time.  So it is more

I don't believe that's a good argument.

A sufficiently large high latency miner who doesn't receive the most work block
in time would cause huge disruptions to the network, potentially causing other
miners to be unprofitable. I even gave a talk on this a few years back, on how
if Bitcoin mining in space becomes profitable, it'll cause enormous problems
due to the slow speed of light.

> of a question of how rare does it need to be, and what can we do to reduce
> the chances of such situations arising (e.g. updating our mining policy to
> leave some transactions out based on current (and anticipated) mempool
> conditions, or (for a sufficiently capitalized miner) leave an explicit,
> ANYONECANSPEND transaction output as a tip for the next miner to build upon
> mined blocks.)

...at which point the large miners are likely to be significantly more
profitable than small miners, because they can collect more fees. That's a
disaster.

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org

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