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Not a mempool dev, but my perspective is fractured mempools will entrench their position. Mining has been like this since ~2016 (the pool dynamics probably more like 2013), but at least the majority actors have changed and mutated over time. It is possible for new participants to enter and leave depending on their profitability in the open market.

But I agree, making it easier to produce our own templates, run our own pools, and make their payouts more transparent is more important (which is why I spend a significant chunk of my time reviewing the new Bitcoin Core mining interface).

vnprc 7mo ago

I feel like fractured mempools are inevitable. Why are our best and brightest fighting so hard against something that is inevitable? If bitcoin is not resilient to fractured mempools then it was never going to work.

I don't believe this for a second. I believe bitcoin is far more resilient than our experts think it is. We need to take the leash off and let this doggie run.

There are so many more and larger issues to starting a new pool. Eeking out a sliver of profitability from your block templates just doesn't move the needle. We're not gonna fix mining centralization by twiddling with policy knobs.

I think we win by empowering plebs to run their own pool. The deeper I get into this problem the more convinced I am that we need to completely rewrite the whole mining stack. It's a massive undertaking.

I am continually confused and frustrated by the amount of attention and resources focused on bitcoin core. It seems like a severe misallocation of resources and the current drama is just a symptom of the root problem.

If I had my druthers we would have several large funding orgs focused exclusively on mining and less orgs focused exclusively on bitcoin core.

Y'all are missing the forest for the trees. We need more bitcoiners to step back and look at the big picture.

Just my 2 sats...

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Discussion

YODL 7mo ago

Was just wondering about this too. Don't have the tech knowledge to weigh in, but the more I thought about it the more I wondered about the magnitude of rapid block propagation (or whatever right term is) issue resulting from small miners having less complete mempools. Sure it's true, but is it a big thing? I know from looking at slow txn attack that a small delay does very little to advantage an attacker (even a 20% attacker only gains a few effective points hash advantage with a 100 second delay, and only on blocks subsequent to the nonstd ones they mine).

vnprc 7mo ago

With a million small miners doing heat capture it makes no difference at all. People are too focused on where we are and not where we're going.

YODL 7mo ago

Good Dispatch other day. Made me wanna get a bitaxe to mess around with.

vnprc 7mo ago

YODL 7mo ago

Done

Peter Todd 7mo ago

They're not inevitable. Core is already pretty close to having no meaningful transaction filters; filtering is why mempools are fracturing.

vnprc 7mo ago

mo pools mo transaction accelerators

sedited 7mo ago

> i feel like fractured mempools are inevitable.

Can you try to spell this out? I don't think it is uniformly achievable either, but I think effort should be spent to at least nudge people into the direction.

(On my phone, so hard to structure my replies, free wheeling the rest 😛)

The organisation that sponsors my work, has also spent very considerable resources on stratumv2 on every layer of its protocol. That seems like a fair allocation of resources to me. Was their effort misguided and their stack worthless?

Bitcoin Core devs working on the mempool also spend way less time on what I'd call "uniformity enforcement" and better templates, than they do making sure transactions confirm when the user expects them to and that they can't be pinned, which is crucial for any L2, but especially for lightning.

I think the asymmetry in resource allocation you perceive is mostly a symptom of where people perceive the risk and have clear agency to act. It might be less clear to people what the pool forest is and what the concrete steps to solve it are.

vnprc 7mo ago

I really appreciate the discussion and pushback. I have an outsider view so it's really great to get an insider perspective.

From an information theoretic perspective, you simply cannot ensure immediate dispersal of information across the whole network. With more and smaller nodes on more marginal internet connections this will only continue.

My mental model of bitcoin is a distributed organic network like an insect hive superorganism or an interconnected grove of trees. These networks diffuse information slowly, they don't maintain a global state.

I think everyone is using the wrong mental model. All this talk about MEV and the evils of centralization pressure assumes a global state. Global state is the enemy. Global state is what destroyed Ethereum. Mempool is attempted global state. We should be moving in the opposite direction. What happened to erlay??

I think it would be dope to have a node without a mempool at all. We can replace the mempool with weak blocks. Weak blocks indicate what transactions are actively being worked on by miners. This is a much stronger signal than fee rates because it represents miner proof of work so it will account for invisible out of band payments. Guess what? P2Pool already does this. It's called a sharechain.

What kind of impact would deleting tx relay and the mempool have on the resource profile of a bitcoin node? Doesn't really matter right now. We need libbitcoinkernel before we can even get started. Please keep up the good work! I mean it when I say your project is the most important one in core.

Love Sv2. I am building on it. I do not believe those resources were wasted, I think they were crucial and those investments are now paying off in second order effects, including my project. My frustration comes from looking at the number of funding orgs. When I survey the landscape I see four routes for funding:

- Spiral

- OpenSats

- HRF ✅

- and the new kid on the block 256 Foundation

256 is out because of some (IMO dumb) license restrictions. I got a small HRF grant. Very happy about that! HRF is the org I personally align with most. It makes me proud to be a grant recipient. ❤️‍🔥 That money was gone practically before it landed, though. Can't reapply until 2026. That leaves me with 2 sources of funding: the Silicon Valley VCs or the Tennessee Valley VCs. Grant apps outstanding. Nothing but crickets. So I just have to wait, watch my life savings dissipate, and hope I don't get caught up in some bullshit political nonsense and locked out of funding. Not a great spot to be in...

If I was a core dev I could apply to:

- Spiral

- OpenSats

- HRF

- Chaincode

- Brink

- Maelstrom

- Blockstream

- MIT DCI

- NYDIG

that's not even counting the exchanges:

- OKCoin

- Bitfinex

- Gemini

- Kraken

- BitMEX

Hell even Coinbase funded some core devs! Fucking Coinbase!

I dunno if all these orgs are offering grants right now but they have funded core devs in the past. There may be even more orgs I missed. Do you see the discrepancy?

I don't want to take anything away from core devs and I don't think any of them are working on unimportant things but if you think about it the problems with mining are the most imminent threat to bitcoin. This is where we should be focusing the most attention and resources. Where are the resources??

You want concrete steps? Call me. I got more ideas than I can act on. It's hard to get motivated when it feels like people don't give enough of a shit to put some money on the table.

I'm just doing the best I can but the clock is ticking. I'm not gonna work my ass off for the rest of my life only to die poor. My kids deserve better than that. Sorry for the rant. It feels good to get this shit off my chest tho.

I gotta get back to work now. Bitcoin ain't gonna save itself.

sedited 7mo ago

Thanks for taking the time to write this all out. I'll ponder what you said here and really hope you find someone to keep supporting you! Early is making very good progress lately. Full network simulations, the utilities are in place, and the PR should be ready for final review in a few weeks from what I'm reading. Weak blocks are at least discussed a lot, afaik spiral is doing some research in how they might help us with fee estimation and propagation. Stuff takes time to propagate, and a perfect global view is indeed impossible. We have the slowest block times for a reason, and I think all these things really work together to get us as close to a fair chance at getting the best templates (though as you say, that might not be the top priority at the moment).

vnprc 7mo ago

maelstrom apparently is not restricted to core devs, despite what their site implies

will apply soon! 🚀

vnprc 7mo ago

i need to drop this defeatist attitude and reach out to some of the other core dev orgs, they may be open to a mining grant

e5bab168... 7mo ago

Please explain a little what is meant by fractured mempools.

e5bab168... 7mo ago

Never mind, I wasn't seeing all the replies. I'll catch up.