Author: Peter Todd 2013-09-23 13:34:19
Published on: 2013-09-23T13:34:19+00:00
The current system lacks a way for a node to know if a transaction has been broadcast successfully. This makes it difficult to determine if a transaction failed to propagate across the network or failed to pay sufficient fees. Broadcasting blocks that almost met the difficulty target provides clients with fast and honest proof about the hashing power mining their transaction. However, mempool-based fee estimation is limited by the ability of peers to lie, particularly to SPV peers. Miners can conduct sybil attacks where they lie to peers about the average fees required to get transactions into blocks. Miner incentives to create near blocks include pre-propagating transactions, reducing block propagation times, and determining the majority side in the event of a fork. Near blocks should contain two types of information: transactions known to the miner but not included in the current block, and transactions the miner is attempting to mine. Transaction mutability complicates both types of information. Bandwidth usage is reasonable. An out-of-band fee payment service can use near-blocks to check that their fee offer has been accepted and miners are mining their transaction. Spot-check auditing can detect any withholding of valid bloom filter matches. Proof-of-propagation and proof-of-mining let miners cheat; thus, there is an argument that we need miners to prove they possess the UTXO set.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T17:03:34.004807+00:00