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From: Peter Todd <pete@petertodd.org>
To: Jeremy <jlrubin@mit.edu>,
	Bitcoin Protocol Discussion
	<bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: lightning-dev <lightning-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] [Pre-BIP] Fee Accounts
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2022 01:58:56 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <YgS3sJvg6kG3WnVJ@petertodd.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAD5xwhik6jVQpP2_ss7d5o+pPLsqDCHuaXG41AMKHVYhZMXF1w@mail.gmail.com>

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On Sat, Jan 01, 2022 at 12:04:00PM -0800, Jeremy via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Happy new years devs,
> 
> I figured I would share some thoughts for conceptual review that have been
> bouncing around my head as an opportunity to clean up the fee paying
> semantics in bitcoin "for good". The design space is very wide on the
> approach I'll share, so below is just a sketch of how it could work which
> I'm sure could be improved greatly.
> 
> Transaction fees are an integral part of bitcoin.
> 
> However, due to quirks of Bitcoin's transaction design, fees are a part of
> the transactions that they occur in.
> 
> While this works in a "Bitcoin 1.0" world, where all transactions are
> simple on-chain transfers, real world use of Bitcoin requires support for
> things like Fee Bumping stuck transactions, DoS resistant Payment Channels,
> and other long lived Smart Contracts that can't predict future fee rates.
> Having the fees paid in band makes writing these contracts much more
> difficult as you can't merely express the logic you want for the
> transaction, but also the fees.
> 
> Previously, I proposed a special type of transaction called a "Sponsor"
> which has some special consensus + mempool rules to allow arbitrarily
> appending fees to a transaction to bump it up in the mempool.
> 
> As an alternative, we could establish an account system in Bitcoin as an
> "extension block".

<snip>

> This type of design works really well for channels because the addition of
> fees to e.g. a channel state does not require any sort of pre-planning
> (e.g. anchors) or transaction flexibility (SIGHASH flags). This sort of
> design is naturally immune to pinning issues since you could offer to pay a
> fee for any TXID and the number of fee adding offers does not need to be
> restricted in the same way the descendant transactions would need to be.

So it's important to recognize that fee accounts introduce their own kind of
transaction pinning attacks: third parties would be able to attach arbitrary
fees to any transaction without permission. This isn't necessarily a good
thing: I don't want third parties to be able to grief my transaction engines by
getting obsolete transactions confirmed in liu of the replacments I actually
want confirmed. Eg a third party could mess up OpenTimestamps calendars at
relatively low cost by delaying the mining of timestamp txs.

Of course, there's an obvious way to fix this: allow transactions to designate
a pubkey allowed to add further transaction fees if required. Which Bitcoin
already has in two forms: Replace-by-Fee and Child Pays for Parent.

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

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  parent reply	other threads:[~2022-02-10  6:59 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 44+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2022-01-01 20:04 [bitcoin-dev] [Pre-BIP] Fee Accounts Jeremy
2022-01-18 16:12 ` Billy Tetrud
2022-01-18 17:43   ` Jeremy
2022-01-19  2:37     ` Billy Tetrud
2022-01-19  2:51       ` Jeremy
2022-01-19  4:53         ` Billy Tetrud
2022-01-19  7:32           ` Jeremy
2022-01-19 16:51             ` Billy Tetrud
2022-01-19 20:08               ` Jeremy
2022-01-20  5:23                 ` Billy Tetrud
2022-02-10  6:58 ` Peter Todd [this message]
2022-02-10  8:08   ` Jeremy Rubin
2022-02-18 23:50     ` Peter Todd
2022-02-19  0:38       ` Jeremy Rubin
2022-02-19  9:39         ` Peter Todd
2022-02-19 17:20           ` [bitcoin-dev] [Lightning-dev] " darosior
2022-02-19 20:35             ` Peter Todd
2022-02-20  2:24               ` ZmnSCPxj
2022-02-20  2:39                 ` ZmnSCPxj
     [not found]             ` <590cf52920040c9cf7517b219624bbb5@willtech.com.au>
2022-02-20 14:24               ` ZmnSCPxj
2022-02-20 16:29                 ` Jeremy Rubin
     [not found]                 ` <CAD5xwhgEeTETburW=OBgHNe_V1kk8o06TDQLiLgdfmP2AEVuPg@mail.gmail.com>
2022-02-20 16:34                   ` ZmnSCPxj
2022-02-20 16:45                     ` Jeremy Rubin
2022-02-20 16:29           ` [bitcoin-dev] " Jeremy Rubin
2022-04-10 19:32             ` Peter Todd
2022-04-11 13:18               ` Jeremy Rubin
2022-04-15 14:52                 ` Peter Todd
2022-04-17 20:57                   ` Jeremy Rubin
2022-04-28 12:15                     ` Peter Todd
2022-05-02 15:59                       ` Jeremy Rubin
2022-06-14 11:12                         ` [bitcoin-dev] Why OpenTimestamps does not "linearize" its transactions Peter Todd
2022-06-14 11:39                           ` Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim of Many
2022-06-14 11:53                             ` Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim of Many
2022-06-14 12:28                               ` rot13maxi
2022-06-14 12:45                                 ` Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim of Many
2022-06-14 13:55                                   ` Bryan Bishop
2022-06-14 15:06                                     ` digital vagabond
2022-06-14 15:34                                   ` Peter Todd
2022-06-14 17:15                                     ` Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim of Many
2022-06-14 20:33                                       ` Andrew Poelstra
2022-06-15  1:16                                         ` Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim of Many
2022-06-15  1:21                                           ` Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim of Many
2022-06-19 11:04                                           ` Peter Todd
2022-06-14 15:22                               ` Peter Todd

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