Author: David A. Harding 2020-04-22 11:51:30
Published on: 2020-04-22T11:51:30+00:00
The discussion on Lightning-dev mailing list has highlighted the importance of considering mempool behavior in context to miners and relay nodes. While miners can offset their costs through block rewards, relay nodes do not receive any direct financial compensation for processing and relaying unconfirmed transactions. The default settings of Bitcoin Core require each replacement to pay a feerate of 10 nBTC/vbyte over an existing transaction or package. Without enforcement of BIP125 rule 3, an attacker could waste a collective 20 terabytes of network bandwidth for a total fee cost of $10.50 by creating a large transaction with low fees and then replacing it multiple times with higher feerates. This scenario would severely affect relay nodes that have no incentive to accept such wasted bandwidth. Relay nodes play a crucial role in maintaining a public relay network that helps protect against miner centralization. Therefore, it is essential to keep the cost of operating a relay node within a reasonable margin of the cost of operating a minimal-bandwidth blocks-only node.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T00:50:24.950542+00:00