Depending on the needs of the L2, it could be that anyone who completes a valid block with the mempool from 6 blocks ago, within (say) 15 minutes, can be an L2S.
I can construct a valid block with no work, so I think you'd need to figure out how to create PoW threshold on L2S blocks.
If the first valid block is added to the blockchain, many/most miners will not keep mining to get the L2S status; they will just give up their block and start fresh from the mempool.
If earning L2S status is desirable, many miners will do it. If it isn't desirable, why would anyone? I think you want to design such a system with incentives for participation.
I think you can prove you built a block an hour ago because you pushed it to the network then (an hour ago).
Anyone that received the block an hour ago knows it's at least an hour old, but anyone who didn't receive the block an hour ago can't prove it's an hour old regardless of the transactions it contains.
195 sats \ 1 reply \ @joda OP 3 Feb
threshold-- yes.
I think any non-tokenized L2 will be fee-based, so the fees will incentivize participation. But only progressive miners will run such software in the beginning, and fees will be need to be balanced such that they are as low as possible for the users while still incentivizing participation among miners. If the fees start low, then few miners will care; if fees start high, then users won't care. So I imagine dynamic fees controlled by the market will be appropriate. And with good network effects, even low fees can be profitable if there is enough volume. Right now, Lightning is practically unprofitable, right? I don't know anyone running a node who makes any real money from it; it's always a passion project. But a miner could subsidize their costs and diversify (and possibly stabilize) their income by participating in L2.
I think you are probably right about the clock time issue; I was imagining looking at the transactions in the block to compare to ones that were in the mempool at each of the following blocks, but that is misguided because in the adversarial condition, the cheater would just use the old mempool to create a block. Perhaps instead of sending the block to other miners, the block could be sent to all L2Ss, at the time of creation. Barring that, maybe we would have to use the current/recent block, and just deal with the conflict in a different way.
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Actually, with regards to the timing issue, maybe the miner could publish a hash of their block inside a transaction. Then it is at least in the mempool if not a block (and "everyone" would know when it entered "the" mempool). I don't actually know how many transactions are in any given mempool...
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