> I believe it would take some ~95% of nodes to filter certain transactions before it meaningfully stifles their ability to make it to miners
I agree, especially with your parenthetical caveat. However, I also think many miners start questioning the wisdom of mining widely filtered transactions well before ~95% filtering is reached. Mining a widely filtered transaction means your block will propagate more slowly than if you did not mine that transaction, which, especially for small miners, increases the likelihood of it becoming a stale block. Making miners think twice about whether it's worth it is, imo, a good thing. Again, the more people run filters, the stronger this effect, but I bet it starts having an effect as early as 50% filtering.
Replies (2)
What you're describing is a centralizing effect. (Less stale blocks and/or more fees for larger miners versus smaller ones.)
That's not a concern for you? (Why not?)
I agree that there is a centralizing effect when large miners mine spam, and I blame that centralizing effect on the people who create spam and the miners who mine it, rather than on the people who filter it.
I also think relaying spam has a centralizing effect because it disincentivizes running a node, and I think the mempool policy adopted in Bitcoin Core is directly responsible for part of that centralizing effect. By contrast, Knots is not responsible for the centralizing effect produced by golks who bypass Knots's filters.
Thus, both approaches involve a centralizing effect, and an important question is, which effect is worse? One is directly attributable to the mempool policy in Bitcoin Core, which welcomes and redistributed spam; the other is directly attributable to spammers and spam-miners who build tools to bypass Knots' filters. I think the former is worse than the latter.
