Author: alicexbt 2023-02-13 12:34:30
Published on: 2023-02-13T12:34:30+00:00
The author of a message addressed to Bitcoin developers expresses curiosity about how many developers share the sentiment expressed in the famous quote: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." The context for this inquiry is the enthusiasm on social media to run bitcoin core with a patch that would reject some transactions in mempool. The author wonders what would happen if such practices become common and some projects start censoring transactions, and how government agencies could take advantage of the situation. Although it is difficult to censor different types of transaction because there will be some nodes relaying them and miners including them in blocks, the author believes it is still important to discuss this issue and different ways to test censorship resistance. To this end, they suggest an ideal tool for testing censorship resistance that would allow users to construct different types of transactions that might be considered "bad" by some people, broadcast transactions to specific nodes, verify if the transaction was relayed successfully or rejected, and ban such peers using setban RPC as it would increase the probability of tx getting propagated to miners.Additionally, the author suggests the possibility of an external mempool that could be used for non-standard transactions, which could help avoid censorship in some cases. The message provides links to a patch that rejects certain transactions in mempool, a blog post by Peter Todd on testing transaction relay, an example of broadcasting a transaction to specific nodes using libbtc, and the setban RPC documentation. The message closes with the signature of the author, who identifies themselves as the floppy disc guy and indicates the message was sent with Proton Mail secure email.
Updated on: 2023-05-22T23:35:53.578346+00:00