Author: Peter Todd 2022-12-06 07:37:27
Published on: 2022-12-06T07:37:27+00:00
In a message posted on the Bitcoin development mailing list, Peter Todd explains that the chances of censoring transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain are extremely unlikely. He notes that there are approximately 5,000 IPv4 listening nodes connected to the network and that pools run their own nodes, which connect to eight outgoing peers by default. For censorship to be successful, a miner would have to run a single node with no incoming peers and all eight of its peers would need to be one of the 20 censoring nodes. The probability of this occurring is low (0.000256%) even if 20% of the entire network was censoring. Todd concludes that this demonstrates how difficult it is to censor information on the blockchain, making it easy to spread and hard to censor. Todd also notes that for full-replace-by-fee (RBF), just 8.3% of the network needs to run full-RBF for a node to have a 50% chance of connecting to at least one full-RBF peer. He suggests that someone could run a full-RBF node that connects to every single listening node simultaneously. A link to a percolation simulator for full-RBF is included.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T02:50:22.966757+00:00