Author: ZmnSCPxj 2020-02-09 23:59:56
Published on: 2020-02-09T23:59:56+00:00
The context of the conversation revolves around Purge attacks and how they can be prevented. The aim is to discourage miners from including transactions in their block that conflict with the eventually-consistent state of consensus in the mempool. It is noted that the mempool has no consensus, but it is an optimization that prevents a node from needlessly broadcasting transactions. Making consensus dependent on the state of the mempool requires that the state of the mempool at the point at which the block snapshot was taken be recorded. The attack itself is better classified as a form of sabotage than censorship. The goal is to demonstrate the ongoing mutability of transactions beyond any inherent heuristic for “finality”. Incentives of miners mean they will actually want to implement RBF and ignore any "convention" of RBF-flagging. Regardless of however many blocks are attacked, always remember that in the end, this is still a censorship attack: it is attempting to censor Bitcoin completely.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T23:22:48.761185+00:00