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142 sats \ 5 replies \ @Scoresby OP 23 Oct \ parent \ on: "Quasi-consensus": help me understand this conversation with Chris Guida bitcoin
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.
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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