354 sats \ 9 replies \ @k00b 1 Jun 2023 \ on: Too Embarassed To Ask - Your Bitcoin & Lightning Questions Answered bitcoin
Is anyone aware of advanced discussions or proposals on paying for tx routing/relaying as a way of directly incentivizing node running?
I realize that this is very nontrivial which is why I think it's interesting to think about. We pay miners because they are doing a lot of provably hard work, but is it possible to trust minimally pay for less provable or less hard work?
For bitcoin core node running?
Dandelion is probably the most advanced and well talked about protocol for transaction relaying, but that's significant IIRC, and no monetization.
There's no way to prove that transactions you relayed to another person eventually gets relayed to a miner. Instead of paying people for a possible service, IMO it's best to rely on the default bitcoin core logic which does it's best to ensure propagation while trying to protect privacy the best it can. Or to broadcast over tor to blockstream, mempool, etc. for privacy reasons. Perhaps you can pay them if you want but I don't think they'll care about charging for that.
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There's no way to prove that transactions you relayed to another person eventually gets relayed to a miner.
I know there's no current way to, but that's kind of the point of the thought exercise. Is there a way to hypothetically?
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There's already direct incentives to run a node. It's not monetary but you have much better privacy and sovereignty if you run a node.
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But no direct incentives for relaying which is why many nodes don't relay given the tradeoffs, right?
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Most people don't because they don't have a public ip. It's not really the end of the world if 99% of nodes don't allow inbound connections. As long as a decent size do, it should be fine.
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Is that true? Most of us behind nats are on tor but still don't relay. I might be missing something though.
Regardless, the question isn't so much "why should we" but "how could we." I suspect the answer is interesting even if it's undesirable/impractical/pointless. ie I'm not asking the question because I want this in Core. I'm asking as an exercise in incentive design for decentralized systems.
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you relay between your different connections, you just don't accept inbound connections
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That makes sense. But why aren't we all accepting incoming on tor if it makes no difference?
That is, assuming it's not privacy or bandwidth or some other form of "self-defense" that could be marginally influenced with incentives.
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you can just add listenonion=1 to your config
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