Author: Keagan McClelland 2020-05-06 16:00:15
Published on: 2020-05-06T16:00:15+00:00
The concern of consensus capture by any subset of users whose interests diverge from the overall consensus was raised in a conversation between Keagan and Antoine Riard. The scenario discussed was that as light clients outpace full nodes, the costs of security are being externalized from the former onto the latter. If full nodes become harder to run due to this, it will price out some marginal set of full node operators, which will cause an increase in light clients and a redistribution of load onto a smaller surface area. As node counts drop, the set of node operators will increasingly represent economic actors with extreme weight, and their interests may diverge from the population at large. This makes them vulnerable to coercion into behavior they otherwise wouldn't have engaged in. It is essential to be wary of consensus capture by exchanges or HNWI's as much as by miners. Antoine questioned the assumptions made in the consensus capture argument by miners and stated that for such an attack to succeed, several conditions need to be met concerning topology and deployment. He suggested implementing fork anomalies detection that would allow various options such as halting the wallet, waiting for human intervention, fallback connection to a trusted server authoritative on the chain view, or invalidity proofs. However, he agreed that a wide-enough, sane backbone network is needed to build on top, and node adoption should be fostered as much as possible.Luke Dashjr opposed the idea of improving the "full node-less" experience and merging support for BIP 157 in Core, stating that it compromises Bitcoin's security assumption that a supermajority of the economy is verifying their incoming transactions using their full node. Without serious improvements to the full node ratio, Bitcoin is likely to fail. Thus, all efforts to improve the "full node-less" experience should be actively avoided. If Bitcoin can't maintain its security, it can't solve any problem, even access to financial infrastructure for those already denied.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T01:14:32.045787+00:00