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Obviously I am missing something on this. How do you direct the transaction fee to a specific miner? I thought it just went out there for anyone to process. If

Obviously I am missing something on this. How do you direct the transaction fee to a specific miner? I thought it just went out there for anyone to process. If you can, why don't people just direct all their transaction fees at their own mining operation or a friend they trust?

woah 11y ago
I think it goes to whoever gets the block it's in
farmdve 11y ago
Well, if the entity issuing the TX was colluding with a miner, they'd craft the TX and the miner would add it to their mempool without announcing it to the rest of the network. Then when and if this miner finds a block, it would include this transaction.
natrius 11y ago
Hand the signed transaction to that miner instead of broadcasting it to the network. It'll only get mined whenever that miner successfully mines a block.
throwaway7767 11y ago
Instead of sending the transaction out on the p2p network for any miner to include, you just send it privately to the specific miner you want to mine it. Nobody else knows about it, so they can't include it in their blocks. The problem (and the reason this really isn't a useful money-laundering method) is that people watch incoming transactions and blocks, and if a block is mined including a transaction that was not seen previously, it's a strong indication that there's collusion going on.
sp332 11y ago
Usually transactions are published on the network and anyone can choose to include them. But a miner can add transactions that no other miner knows about. Usually you don't want to do it because it takes a long and random amount of time for the transaction to go through (you have to wait for that specific miner to win a block). But if you're mining it yourself or in collusion with a specific miner, that's a tradeoff you can make.
vilhelm_s 11y ago
Ordinarily transactions are broadcasted to the entire network for anyone to process. The miner who first finds a solution will get the fee for that transaction. I think the idea here is that you instead privately give the transaction to only your favoured miner. He will then try to hash it, and if and when he finishes it, he will broadcast the transaction and the solution to the network at the same time. Ordinarily there would be no advantage to give your transactions privately to just one miner; if you broadcast it publicly there will be many more miners working on it, so it will commit faster. So unless you are deliberately trying to overpay (like here) it would be a waste of money.
- CydeWeys 11y ago
  > I think the idea here is that you instead privately give the transaction to only your favoured miner. He will then try to hash it, and if and when he finishes it, he will broadcast the transaction and the solution to the network at the same time. That's not really a good description of how this will work. Each miner maintains a transaction pool of transactions that have been broadcasted across the network. Think of it as a priority queue. Transactions are of different sizes and fees, and the miner is trying to maximize their total fee up to the 1 MB block size limit. These transaction pools are largely the same across all miners, with of course some differences owing to time delays and network propagation issues. So all that would happen in miner tumbling is that the miner maintains its transaction pool as normal, but then additionally adds in the special transaction that it does not rebroadcast. The end result is you end up mining a block that has almost the same transactions in it as any other miner would, except with that one extra special transaction, and a low priority one being bumped.
  - nandemo 11y ago
    I might be wrong, but I feel you gave a lower-level (more detailed) description of "the idea here is that you instead privately give the transaction to only your favoured miner".
    - CydeWeys 11y ago

woah 11y ago

I think it goes to whoever gets the block it's in

farmdve 11y ago

Well, if the entity issuing the TX was colluding with a miner, they'd craft the TX and the miner would add it to their mempool without announcing it to the rest of the network. Then when and if this miner finds a block, it would include this transaction.

natrius 11y ago

Hand the signed transaction to that miner instead of broadcasting it to the network. It'll only get mined whenever that miner successfully mines a block.

throwaway7767 11y ago

Instead of sending the transaction out on the p2p network for any miner to include, you just send it privately to the specific miner you want to mine it. Nobody else knows about it, so they can't include it in their blocks. The problem (and the reason this really isn't a useful money-laundering method) is that people watch incoming transactions and blocks, and if a block is mined including a transaction that was not seen previously, it's a strong indication that there's collusion going on.

sp332 11y ago

Usually transactions are published on the network and anyone can choose to include them. But a miner can add transactions that no other miner knows about. Usually you don't want to do it because it takes a long and random amount of time for the transaction to go through (you have to wait for that specific miner to win a block). But if you're mining it yourself or in collusion with a specific miner, that's a tradeoff you can make.

vilhelm_s 11y ago

Ordinarily transactions are broadcasted to the entire network for anyone to process. The miner who first finds a solution will get the fee for that transaction. I think the idea here is that you instead privately give the transaction to only your favoured miner. He will then try to hash it, and if and when he finishes it, he will broadcast the transaction and the solution to the network at the same time. Ordinarily there would be no advantage to give your transactions privately to just one miner; if you broadcast it publicly there will be many more miners working on it, so it will commit faster. So unless you are deliberately trying to overpay (like here) it would be a waste of money.

CydeWeys 11y ago
> I think the idea here is that you instead privately give the transaction to only your favoured miner. He will then try to hash it, and if and when he finishes it, he will broadcast the transaction and the solution to the network at the same time. That's not really a good description of how this will work. Each miner maintains a transaction pool of transactions that have been broadcasted across the network. Think of it as a priority queue. Transactions are of different sizes and fees, and the miner is trying to maximize their total fee up to the 1 MB block size limit. These transaction pools are largely the same across all miners, with of course some differences owing to time delays and network propagation issues. So all that would happen in miner tumbling is that the miner maintains its transaction pool as normal, but then additionally adds in the special transaction that it does not rebroadcast. The end result is you end up mining a block that has almost the same transactions in it as any other miner would, except with that one extra special transaction, and a low priority one being bumped.
- nandemo 11y ago
  I might be wrong, but I feel you gave a lower-level (more detailed) description of "the idea here is that you instead privately give the transaction to only your favoured miner".
  - CydeWeys 11y ago