Author: Antoine Riard 2023-05-22 01:27:41
Published on: 2023-05-22T01:27:41+00:00
The Bitcoin community has been discussing the topics of covenants and payment pools recently, but there has been little agreement on a precise definition for these concepts. In an attempt to clarify the issue of payment pools, a non-custodial payment pool scheme that could be used by miners of a mining pool to share the ownership of the coinbase reward has been proposed. The scheme is based on payment trees, which are trees of transactions that redistribute funds to payment pool participants using their addresses as leaves; the root contains the payment pool's funds on an n-of-n multisig. This payment tree enables a compact withdrawal from the pool, with varying degrees of conservation of pooling after a withdrawal. To achieve off-chain novation of the pool tree, replay security is necessary, which ensures that a pool participant cannot replay its withdrawal, partially or in whole, after withdrawing all their balances. While most payment pool structures use precompiled transactions for safe withdrawal, this isn't feasible if every extranonce tried by every miner requires a set of precompiled transactions. Instead, the proposed scheme uses ANYPREVOUT signatures, allowing miners to collectively construct a payment tree that "waits" for rewards when miners find a block. The average space occupied on the blockchain is compared with that of P2Pool, and the results show promise. The lack of cooperation among pool participants to enable cooperative withdrawal can be a huge denial-of-service factor, but this can be fought with fees to enter the pool. A deterrence is the timelocking of the balance in case of non-cooperative closure. Past force-closure of pools can be consumed as proof of good conduct by future co-participants in a payment pool.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T18:15:08.786300+00:00