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 ⤵