Out of band payments to miners are the market mitigating an inefficiency which exists as a result of policy rules which are (rightly) designed to protect nodes from DOS attacks.
Personally I am very supportive of bitcoin developers efforts to resolve these inefficiencies in a decentralised way. I also think that there are often advantages afforded by centralised systems (which of course come with trade offs), which can be leveraged by those who opt-in to using them.
Without the need to make onchain transactions there is the potential to fee bump awkward transactions (which can't be bumped easily by other means today) without overpaying. Examples of such awkward transactions include;
- geographically separated multisig where the signing process may take many days / weeks from start to end
- channel close transactions with a fee rate below the purge rate
- tx's sent from wallets without RBF/CPFP tooling
Past and current transaction prioritisation tools leave much to be desired;
- opaque fees and terms
- limited access for users and miners / pools
- private acceleration bids (prior to confirmation) meaning counter bids cannot be made
- private acceleration fees (after confirmation) making it hard for miners in pools to audit whether out of band payments are being collected
I believe that a transparent alternative is possible with
- clear fees and terms
- wider access for users and miners / pools
- public acceleration data for both bids and fees
Because I believe this I am working to help deliver
@Mempool
Accelerator, which I hope will demonstrate that such a radically transparent alternative is possible.
The block audit feature was the first step in this journey, providing bitcoiners with the tools to detect likely OOB payments, including those made by mempool.
If you have a specific use case for Mempool Accelerator i'd love to hear about it.
email orangesurf at mempool dot space
matrix orangesurf:bitcoin.kyoto