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102 sats \ 9 replies \ @Undisciplined 23 Oct \ parent \ on: "Quasi-consensus": help me understand this conversation with Chris Guida bitcoin
You’ve written about how being an economic node is what matters.
How can that be true without implying any shared policies amongst those nodes are impactful?
We still have censorship resistance because there’s no stopping someone from mining their own blocks, right?
As far as relay policies go, a node's economic weight doesn't matter.
Think about it this way: a node can relay transactions even if it's never been used to verify coins in any particular wallet. A node can refuse to relay transactions even if all it has ever done is download and verify the chain. In fact the "amount" of relaying a node does is the same no matter how it is used. It either relays a transaction or it doesn't.
When people (also including me) talk about economic nodes, they mean that you are using your node to say: "Yes, these coins I accept follow the consensus rules of bitcoin. I will accept them." An economic node with a lot of weight is able to say this about a lot of coins.
The reason relay policy is different is that you and I can have completely different relay policies and still agree on the state of the chain. This is not the case of consensus rules.
A big economic node will still have to accept as valid a block that includes transactions it refused to relay (transactions that it filtered or that it never allowed in it's mempool in the first place).
I suppose the economic node could refuse to accept any block that had transactions it didn't like, but if that was the case, the node would effectively be creating new consensus rules...and it would need to be sure that at least 51% of the hashrate followed the same rules.
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Thanks for straightening me out there. Economic node isn't the right term for this.
Still, if your transaction has some feature that goes against the mempool policy of every single miner, there's no way that transaction is going through. Spinning up nodes on AWS that will store and relay your transaction obviously wouldn't help with that.
On the flip side, if your transaction conforms to the policies of miners then it will go through, regardless of how many AWS nodes are spun up that would reject it.
It's about connectedness to successful miners. The censorship resistance comes from how difficult it is to block the path to miners and from having free entry into mining.
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if your transaction conforms to the policies of miners
yes! but this is the same as saying "if your transaction is a transaction a miner wants to mine", the mempool policy part is unimportant.
And this was the point I was trying to get to: in the case where many or almost half of all miners don't like your transaction, Bitcoin is designed to incentivize new miners to enter the game or current miners to change their mind. That's what's so great about it!
The censorship resistance comes from how difficult it is to block the path to miners and from having free entry into mining.
I believe my position is that only the latter matters. Free entry into mining is the important part.
Mempool policies really have very little to do with it. Due to the nature of electronic communication, it's pretty easy to get to a miner who is interested in mining your transaction (although how might look very different from a relay network run y nodes).
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If it were easy to block someone's path to a miner, you wouldn't consider that a censorship issue?
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I don't think it is possible to make it difficult.
If it was, then this would be a major vulnerability to bitcoin, and many of our previous assumptions about its usefulness would be in serious trouble.
see your point: #1263232
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We're saying the same thing.
I'm just pointing out that in the abstract this property matters for censorship resistance and you're saying that we have this property, which I'm not questioning.
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We still have censorship resistance because there’s no stopping someone from mining their own blocks, right?
No, see #1222210:
Sure, it only takes one block, but if everybody else can get into each block while I can only get into one block a year, I would consider myself censored, not very unlike a bank closing my account.
In reality, if you’re really mining your own tx, it’s more like never though.
Bitcoin’s censorship resistance relies on miners acting in their own interest, not that everyone is mining their own tx, that would be ridiculous.
Chris Guida & Co. are suggesting miners to not be selfish, see debate in the linked post.
This is absolutely crazy to me.
You should really watch the debate.
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I get that. I articulated my thoughts better here #1263201
Free entry into mining, means profit seekers will come in and accept those censored transactions, but just that threat of entry will keep miners from engaging in widespread censorship.
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