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Slipstream is Marathon Digital's private mempool product. Cool product name. They can offer such a product because they're both a miner and a mining pool. Another example of the power vertical mining integration bestows. Leveraging the whole stack. Marathon btw, is the only public US miner with their own mining pool.
Slipstream is being marketed as a service for direct submission of large, complex, or non-standard bitcoin transactions — that meet a minimum fee threshold. Thinking about the future, wether it's Slipstream or private contracts for tx block inclusion doesn't matter, because they're effectively the same evil. I'm happy to play devil's advocate here, and don't see the problem with these products because they look like linear progressions of where mining was always trending. In some telling, thinking about bitcoin globally, these "private" mempools can be seen as another option in the larger jurisdictional arbitrage game, and a tool making mining more efficient, for what is now commoditized blockspace. And swallowing two fingers of whiskey with the following: if success is proven with the products and the powers that vertical mining integration bestow, is it possible that mining on a higher order decentralizes further as a result of that success, that we see more miner-pool formations? That's a stretch, but:
Assuming bitcoin expands like us maxis bugle about, and blockspace becomes so valuable, then if you're a business, a tax haven country, an LSP, PMC, a certain AI agent, etc, and you DON'T mine, you're going to require access to blockspace for large value settlements or urgent one-off tx's. In that environment of compressed commoditized blockspace, just broadcasting a tx with a high fee guarantees you nothing in terms of block inclusion for reasons lightly touched on in the last post I wrote. I feel you also run the risk of trade friction with blockspace itself when broadcasting your tx, where the private mempools can otherwise keep the volatility in check, and pricing predictable, during certain stretches of demand.
I'm just saying, maximalism actually playing out was never a home miner thing, that's bitcoin minimalism, where your grandma and DIYers regularly broadcast directly on the layer of gods. Maximalism, in mining terms, is an industrial grid connecting, public listing, commoditized derivative, energy recycling, contract making, fiat leveraging (while it's around), international and domestic settlement process. That includes a bunch of bureaucracy we have to work through. The latter is the cost of living on a subsidized fossil-fuel standard, where large miners choose to go public and get reg'd in exchange for access to debt markets and shareholders to grow. Correct my view below ⤵
Good post
Slipstream allows more people to invest in mining or blockchain or mempool, the more the merrier
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Thank you for thinking when others aren't brave enough to!
Do you think directly paying miners could cause dominant pools to grow even larger than non-dominant ones (and eventually put small miners out of business)?
That's the one risk of directly paying miners. Another related risk, is killing mempools generally which are, today at least, subject to a soft consensus which is nontrivial to control and thus is generally very censorship resistant.
If this kind of Slipstream thing doesn't kill small miners and the mempool, having other ways to include txs in a blocks should be less fragile than the mempool alone, shouldn't it? If the majority of mempool policers suffer from the same delusion that censors certain people, having ways to connect with dissenting pools/miners is more censorship resistant, isn't it?
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"Private Mempool" is such a nice euphemism for "closed source submission service". They're sort of BS even though they're completely within the rules. Trying to find the positives, I feel it highlights the freedom, flexibility to innovate, and ability to contract at will when you run the miner and the pool, and a bunch of miners are watching them for signal. And watching El Salvador's Lava Pool too, the first PPP (public private partnership) miner-pool, to see how successful they are. Maybe it breaks the now dominant pools down into more strong independent miner run pools instead of just a miner directing hash to a 3rd-party hashpower blob, and the remaining 3rd-party pools are more plebeian pools, not squeezed so tight on a pie-chart that they're invisible, and they're adding txs from the network like always. Marathon Pool running Slipstream is small (2.5% of hashpower) but they fired a shot here and their public competitors look boring to investors, even if the product Slipstream doesn't add up to anything.
I don't think it's a threat to mempool propagation or small miners with good energy or challenges node checkpointing, because I think it's going to be a thing for very large transactions with many outputs and complexity. Or one-off stuff that needs a confirmation window. Or future dated stuff that wants to lock-in an advertised rate today. I'm hoping this all acts as tx hand holding that helps normalize/incentivize much larger transactions (not Taproot Wizards shitcoinery) and thus helps scaling incrementally.
I agree strongly with your last part. And there always needs to be a reality where there's enough miners that a tx (with a suitable fee) will eventually be confirmed regardless of size or locale.
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543 sats \ 2 replies \ @freetx 23 Feb
Its hard to know how its going to play out.
  • If BTC prices go 3-4x minimum each halving, then perhaps miners are able to still make enough profit without going "memepool subscription" model
  • On the other hand why would prices continue to go 3-4x each halving?.... after all miners are producing less and less coins so, their impact is becoming negligible.
  • If each halving starts producing less upward effect on prices, then miners will need a new revenue source.
  • If prices go up by 3-4x, then what happens to fees? You could make the argument that insanely high BTC prices will put downward pressure on fees
  • Or will a shift to payment processors and large financial institutions make up the difference (Blackrock probably doesn't care about a $350 fee to send $800,000,000)?
There are so many moving parts that its hard to accurately predict how its going to play out.
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Nobody knows true. The energy transition is a big influencer, we've yet to see the first mining PPP (private public partnership) play out with the indie LavaPool of El Salvador (could they wind up the money laundering capital of the world?), and what will the global regulation chess board look like for jurisdictional arbitrage? I feel after watching the 10k's of many public mining companies, most will consolidate or go bust. Any of them that can prove the miner-pool model (as opposed to just directing hash to a pool) have huge flexibility to pounce on innovation or contracting, and to build trust, which will earn them those enormous sized txs submitted directly representing many interests. I always assumed mining probably moves to a higher order, where nation states, diverse PPPs, and renewable energy operate.
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About downward pressure on fees, are you talking in bitcoin terms?
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Miners should not be able to add transactions to blocks which haven't been propagated by the network of nodes. It's an attack vector and it needs to be closed, I expect that it will be at some stage.
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21 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 24 Feb
Have you seen a coherent proposal that could stop this from happening? Afaict it's at least nontrivial if not impossible. Txs would need to be subject to another layer of consensus.
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Unfortunately, no.
I think the more reasonable approach would be gain consensus to update Core filters and make it easy to identify miners including out of band transactions in their blocks so that social pressure and potential lost hashrate does the rest.
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Would you say standardizing the mempool could be considered centralization @DudeJLebowski? As far as social pressure, it might not work because hashrate isn't something you can take away from a miner that is also their own pool.
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It wouldn't work anyway, you'd need to have a process to decide on the "correct" mempool.
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Could you explain more about the evil?
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The evil is referencing this sort of expanding conversation on X (maXis) that's percolated elsewhere about the dangers of private mempools, as if consensus rules have been broken, and we need to do everything short of forking a stop to it. 🤷‍♂️
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I appreciate this thread and resultant conversations; and also admit that it's firmly in the territory of stuff that I don't know what to think about. It seems clear that the ecosystem around tx confirmation -- most obviously mining, but also other stuff -- is going to be one of those emergent ecosystems that you can't foresee in advance. Or at least, I can't.
And I have no intuition of what's good or bad, except that the whole dust issue is going to be a thing that everyone thinks about all the time and that's one of the central constructs in how the network unfolds. Either that, or it will be a Mountains of Madness-style dead relic.
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If this starts to get some traction it can bee seen as an attack, then we must hope honest miners are bigger than the non honest ones, that's why pools like Ocean will be important to bring mining back to plebs.
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I feel if it gains traction that means it's successful, and it can nudge mining decentralizing further by incentivizing more pools, and fewer large pools, as in miner-pools instead of just miners directing hash to a pool.
The second thing, is that I feel it can incentivize and normalize, large, complex, and multi-output txs. Like hand holding, until learning to walk. Like, if you're an entity with no mining access, and you do a $15B tx with many outputs representing many interests, are you broadcasting that tx into the ether, or sending it directly to the most trusted miner with a guaranteed confirmation time window that your insurance policy requests?
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Not sure if that is possible or if someone would want it. Because I don't think there isn't a bigger guarantee of time window when you're betting in only one miner, and that miner might take some time to find a block. Then the bidding for the next Block in that miner and it's either a first come first serve policy or bidding like the mempool itself wich makes it worse than broadcast to the network. Then if that miner loses hashrate share, you will have to find another one. I think the market will figure it out it's not worth it.
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The hashpower a miner produces and pool accumulates is verifiable, thusly, over the x-axis one can calculate their average number of blocks to consistently represent their percentage of network power. It's unlikely to change much inside the 2-week difficulty adjustment window The tx's we're presumably talking about are enormous tx's, and may originate from a sanctioned country, or entity looking for privacy, or an entity looking to lock in an advertised mempool rate months into the future. Otherwise there's no guarantee this tx will be confirmed in any reasonable amount of time even with an RBF
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100 sats \ 2 replies \ @Fabs 24 Feb
I don't fully get it, but: Block space = expensive, large tx's to be settled by private mining pools, given one pays the asked fee (future), correct?
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Think of it like the bitcoin blockchain version of an OTC market. My hope is it can incentivize and normalize much larger and more complex transactions. There's more legal liability for the miner but that's a good thing perhaps to where an entity does a $15B tx representing several entities? There's jurisdictional arbitrage there too. Also, this is only possible because of Marathon's vertical mining integration. If this kind of thing is successful, along with other innovative stuff, will it also incentivize more of it, so more independent pools, and fewer oversized 3rd-party hash-power blobs? More independent mining pool distribution, aka decentralization? A stretch, but since it's completely within the consensus rules and nothing can be done about it, I'm trying to highlight positives. 🤷‍♂️
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Sounds like a win, overall.
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I'm trying to figure out which standardness checks are turned off, because most of them are for security/DoS reasons.
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