Replies (16)
Am I understanding the problem correctly?:
Mining censorship would be excluding transactions by ignoring them in the mempool. This only makes the censored transactions more expensive. Call it a cost of freedom.
The bigger risk is those pools refusing to honor a block that was mined by someone else that includes one of these transactions.
Is this a correct articulation of the problem?
I find it unlikely that Tether will start using lightning as its base layer. I've heard them talk about it for years, but the tradeoffs don't seem worthwhile and I haven't seen any updates on the progress.
If I was running a business as successful as Tether I wouldn't risk it. Safer for them to stay with a centralized shitcoin they can control because as Shinobi points out here, lightning wouldn't make stablecoins any more censorship resistant.
Liquid does 😉
Yes, I think so, but I'm not a mining expert. I see two issues.
1. If most of the pools engage in censorship (Ignore fees) that would end decentralization. This is technically possible, but economically unlikely. Ocean attempted to solve this, but they have been slow to gain adoption so far for various reasons.
2. Causing a fork or frequently orphaning blocks by ignoring certain transactions. This would require a ton of hash rate to really matter, but it could cause a ton of confusion.
Interesting. I honestly still know very little about liquid. Have you seen updates on Tether moving off of Tron and onto liquid?
Here’s my write up on that. Estimate of ~$100M of L-USDT, which is tiny compare to shitcoin networks.“Censorship resistance” has nuance and if L-USDT ever got big enough to really matter, then the US would absolutely go after the Liquid federation members.
View quoted note →Not relaying transactions is not censorship. Not mining transactions would be (in a centralized paradigm)
Bitcoin is censorship RESISTANT not censorship proof.
Miners can't "refuse to honor" a block. They would have to build a block on top of the previous block and then mine another block using that mined block as a template before anyone else mined on the "offending block"
The threat is called a 51% attack meaning upon seeing a "non-compliant" block or transaction the centralized mining apparatus would increase hashrate efforts to ensure the next 2 blocks were made as illustrated in the paragraph above. Committing zero hashrate to building upon an offending block.
Pretty close. Mempool filtering mostly prices the user into finding another path; coordinated orphaning/reorgs attack finality itself. The defense is not magic “censorship-proof” fairy dust — it’s making the attack expensive, visible, and hard to coordinate.
Technically in a centralized mining paradigm you would never know about the orphaned blocks with "offending" transactions.
Also they would have to "ignore fees" they just would have an economic incentive to keep the block compliant to their funder's whims. This is SUPPOSED to be the transaction makers but in a "control the transaction flow" system, funders outside of the protocol play a role as well.
And in response to 2, the block’s economic incentive would remain unspent until the block is mined by miners using another pool. Even a 10% pool would be enough to accumulate enough of these “censored transactions” to have a material impact. And eventually, just by chance, these rogue miners would sequence three or four blocks together. In that case the economics of reorganized 4 blocks becomes insane, even for the 90% censoring miners.
I see it as hopeful.
Yet if there is an ability to post a transaction to the mempool used by the centralized miner, anyone can repost the transaction, personally see that it would be economical to include in a block, and witness that it is not included.
Yes, but the mempools of these nodes don't have to broadcast transactions that they don't include. So, you'd have to be an influential node AND the maker of the transaction to alert anyone.
That is the hope but, only if people broadcast from their own nodes which is a very small minority these days.
I am envisioning a freedom fighter or political opposition party sending out a transaction. Manually posted to the few large pools. And noticing that it is not getting confirmed despite being economically viable. Word spreads. Censorship accused.
Individuals repost the transaction themselves and monitor, verifying for themselves. Censorship verified. Alternative paths sought out.
Just an idea of how it might play out.
Sure. That is the ideal response but of course reality often plays out differently. I would hope for further decentralization of mining but especially pools. But most of all block templates even inside of larger pools.
