0 sats \ 3 replies \ @343pg 15 Dec 2023 \ parent \ on: Will we ever see the mempool clear again and 1 sat/vbyte fees? polls
You raise some interesting questions. As always with Bitcoin, there are potential second order effects to such attacks. If the attack doesn’t work - thanks for your contribution to the Bitcoin miners and therefore mining infrastructure. And what if such an attack got revealed for what it was? It’s pretty high risk.
Also - it could become very expensive to really cripple the network- to take up entire blocks you have to outbid absolutely everyone. Otherwise you still have a functional network, just essentially with reduced space in blocks.
You don’t have to outbid everyone, you just have to supply maybe 10% of the transactions at high fee rates, which makes everyone else panic and raise their fees, that creates a sort of run on the bank where there aren’t enough blocks to fit the demand and everyone is fighting to get in before it gets worse.
Maybe 10% is too low. I haven’t done an analysis but I think a lot of the mempool is still regular chain usage (lightning channels and people taking custody, and people actually using bitcoin for money), and they are scrambling on top of each other to pay higher fees.
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I know what you mean - and it’s certainly not linear. But it’s a free market and crucially it never ends. So whilst panic might set in for a while, the free market decides throughout.
I’m not an expert and not been here long enough, but there is also a lack of history here where block space has seemed properly scarce? For the early years it wasn’t so much of an issue at all, then segwit gave some leeway, taproot, lightning have presumably offered similar relief as the network of users has grown? Even regardless of an “attack”, block space is wholly scarce so this will happen over time even with honest actors, as activity in Bitcoin increases.
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agreed. It doesn't matter what the block fees are, things like Cash App and River are going to need to send UTXOs to users who are extracting to self custody and the more users use those tools to do so, the more they will have to use block space. They are batching so they can eat high on chain fees as part of servicing hundreds/thousands of customers in bulk. For most people, owning UTXOs does not have a future--they will just leave bitcoin in custody and let Cash App and the like worry about on chain shenanigans.
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