Author: Jeremy 2020-04-23 01:18:05
Published on: 2020-04-23T01:18:05+00:00
Jeremy Rubin, a Bitcoin Core developer, has been working on solving the mempool problem for months. He is familiar with the issues that exist and the types of pinning possible. Rubin believes that carve outs should not be entertained unless they are trivial, as every new carve-out rule added to the way the mempool operates removes complexity invariants, which aim to preserve the mempool's functionality and keep nodes operational. The path forward, according to Rubin, is to dedicate more development resources towards finishing the mempool project he began. The current focus of this work is primarily on testing construction to better test and catch regressions or vulnerabilities introduced or extant in the mempool, refactoring algorithms in the mempool to reduce constant factors and asymptotics, and package relay. Rubin suggests that if they finish up the algorithmic refactors, it seems plausible to do a one-off increase of descendant limits to say, 100 descendants with no restriction. However, they could use the opportunity to use the 75 descendant increase exclusively for a new carve-out and apply some new stricter rules in that extra space. Package relay is a promising approach for a future pinning solution as there are opportunities to attach to packages compact proofs of improved fee efficiency for pinned transactions. But the groundwork for package relay needs to come first. Longer-term, Rubin has been working on plans and designs to completely redo the mempool's architecture to make it behave for arbitrary cases. It is possible to one day lift all preemptively enforced descendants limits, which can solve this problem for good. Rubin invites developers to coordinate resources around completing this work and making more regular progress on it. He is willing to help point people to specific tasks that need to be done to accelerate this and help serialize the work so that they can avoid getting into rebase hell. Rubin also noted that if anyone or their organizations would like to assist in funding the work described above for a group of developers, he has been working to put resources together for funding the project for a few months now.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T00:43:13.661978+00:00