Published on: 2023-05-22T01:27:41+00:00
In recent discussions within the Bitcoin community, there has been a lack of consensus regarding the definitions of covenants and payment pools. To address this issue, a proposal has been made for a non-custodial payment pool scheme that would enable miners in a mining pool to share ownership of the coinbase reward. This scheme is based on payment trees, which are essentially trees of transactions redistributing funds to payment pool participants using their addresses as leaves. The root of the tree contains the payment pool's funds with an n-of-n multisig.The proposed payment tree allows for a compact withdrawal from the pool, with varying levels of pooling conservation after a withdrawal. In order to achieve off-chain novation of the pool tree, replay security is crucial to prevent participants from replaying their withdrawals, either partially or in full, after withdrawing all their balances. While many payment pool structures rely on precompiled transactions for safe withdrawal, this approach becomes impractical if every extranonce attempted by every miner requires a set of precompiled transactions.Instead, the proposed scheme utilizes ANYPREVOUT signatures, which enables miners to collectively construct a payment tree that "waits" for rewards when a block is found. The authors compare the average space occupied on the blockchain with that of P2Pool and find promising results. However, a significant challenge lies in the lack of cooperation among pool participants to facilitate cooperative withdrawal. This issue can be mitigated through the implementation of fees to enter the pool. Additionally, the balance can be timelocked in case of non-cooperative closure, serving as a deterrent.Furthermore, the authors suggest that past force-closures of pools can be seen as evidence of good conduct by future co-participants in a payment pool. Overall, the proposed scheme offers a potential solution for non-custodial payment pools and presents interesting avenues for further exploration. The authors have released their work as an RFC (Request for Comments) and encourage feedback and input from the Bitcoin community.
Updated on: 2023-08-02T09:24:09.357949+00:00