513 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 24 Feb \ on: A [pro] Marathon Slipstream rant: bitcoin
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?
"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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