Weak blocks, or “near blocks” are not a new idea. In short, have miners propagate what amounts to mining shares over the p2p network, which allows PoW-backed sharing of data. Historical discussions of weak blocks centered around the blocksize and scaling debate, which means there was intense focus on reducing the marginal bytes sent per weak block to aid “gigameg blocks”. There was seemingly a lot of focus on creating DAGs, extra-consensus chains, and similar mechanisms for increasing...| Delving Bitcoin
I mostly made this topic so I could reply here rather than writing up a blog entry of my own. 🙂 So… A few thoughts: I’m not convinced multiprocess is the right way to split things out of core in any meaningful way – as far as I understand it, multiprocess is intended to leave its affected components fairly tightly coupled, so changes to core or the gui or the wallet would likely affect the multiprocess api, and be annoying to coordinate/sync across repos. I think multiprocess/cap...| Delving Bitcoin
Thanks @AntoineP for thinking deeply about this subject and @ajtowns for relaying. I’m not sure Antoine’s “obvious” is obvious to me: Bitcoin Core’s userbase is indirectly all Bitcoin users, [so] how to prioritise development becomes quite clear. Bitcoin Core should be a robust backbone for the Bitcoin network I think it’s weird and non-obvious to define your users as including people who don’t directly use your software. My ISP presumably uses a bunch of software to manage the ...| Delving Bitcoin
@AntoineP wrote three interesting blog posts on Bitcoin Core: Antoine Poinsot - Bitcoin Core project direction “I think we are in this situation where everybody is working on their own thing and there is no broad agreement about what the scope of the project should even be. As a consequence, year after year we keep piling up more code, more features, more RPCs, etc… with at best a constant amount of competent reviewers’ time. This is not tenable, as a focus which gets further dispersed ...| Delving Bitcoin
Most onchain contracts are motivated by eliminating the counterparty risk that comes from relying on a trusted third party. In this case, we get that benefit like usual, but I find it notable that we also (theoretically) get the benefit of not having to worry about principle actor corruption. It’s like being able to bet for your favorite sports team without creating a temptation for the athletes on that team to bet against themselves. For example, a trusted third party arbitrating futures c...| Delving Bitcoin
Subject: An Onchain Implementation Of Mining Feerate Futures Introduction Future onchain fees to be paid to miners cannot, in general, be predicted, as unpredictable novel uses of the blockchain may increase use of block space, and unpredictable novel innovations on block space use reduction may decrease use of block space. This uncertainty makes onchain use unpalatable, and even non-custodial offchain uses like the Lightning Network incur risk of onchain enforcement, and the uncertain onchai...| Delving Bitcoin
In this post, I’ll attempt to summarize my current understanding of how to think about incentive compatibility, which has evolved over the past year while working on the cluster mempool project[1]. Motivating questions Given a mempool with many transactions, which ones should be selected in the next block? Assuming there’s more than one miner on the network[2], the incentive is to maximize the next block’s fees[3] given the block size constraints. Of course, once the next block is found...| Delving Bitcoin