Author: David A. Harding 2020-06-20 10:36:47
Published on: 2020-06-20T10:36:47+00:00
The email thread discusses the potential centralization risk associated with obtaining information from miners' mempools. The concern is that miners may charge for this information, which could result in larger miners being able to charge more money per hashrate than smaller miners. This creates a centralizing force by increasing existing economies of scale. Additionally, information about a node's mempool is partly trusted, so incumbent pools with a long record of trustworthy behavior may be able to charge more per hashrate than newer pools, creating a reputation-based centralizing force that pushes individual miners towards well-established pools. One solution suggested is using independent pay-to-preimage transactions, which doesn't provide reputational advantage or direct economies of scale and is incentive equivalent to paying normal onchain transaction fees. Another suggestion is making pay-to-revealed-adaptor-signature possible using something like OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACK. It is also discussed whether LN nodes should invest in running nodes in mining pools to ensure they learn about attackers' txs and potentially share discovered preimages with the network off-chain. However, it is noted that from the perspective of a single LN node, it might make more sense to get the information and not share it, increasing their security and allowing them to charge lower routing fees compared to competitors. Finally, it is acknowledged that layers can't be fully decoupled with the current security assumptions, and Eltoo may not help in this particular case.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T00:36:16.519412+00:00