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Article asserts that bitcoin transactions should be processed in a more socialist "fair" ordering, as opposed to a more capitalist style "user pays" priority ba

Article asserts that bitcoin transactions should be processed in a more socialist "fair" ordering, as opposed to a more capitalist style "user pays" priority based system: "Although the fee-per-byte dequeuing policy is widely considered the “norm” for prioritizing transactions—we show that miners somehow delay a significant fraction of transactions. Such deviations undermine the utility of blockchains for ensuring a “fair” ordering that might be required for some applications."

jasode 6y ago
>Article asserts that bitcoin transactions should be processed in a more socialist "fair" ordering, as opposed to a more capitalist style "user pays" priority based system: You've mis-interpreted the article. The authors are saying the opposite. The paper is somewhat hard to read maybe because the 4 co-authors are from Germany so their English-as-2nd-language isn't the easiest to parse. For the specific paper, the authors are using "fair" to label fee-based-user-pays-priority which is the conventional expectation of how Bitcoin behaves. However, they analyzed a bunch Bitcoin transactions and noticed that priority based on "user pays" doesn't always happen. They're not exactly sure why but put forth some guesses. They considered that some miners might be "altruistic" (i.e. "socialist") to consider other attributes besides fee payment but they discount that. The other guess they feel is more realistic are "transaction accelerators" that don't broadcast the same blocks to every miner. Excerpt from section 7.1: >We hypothesize that mining pool operators might be sending a different set of transactions to each miner (or perhaps changing this set every a fixed time interval or event) to reduce the network overhead, avoiding miners to request a new task often. It is possible due to the stratum protocol. >Stratum is a pooled mining protocol that focuses on reducing network communication between the mining pool and its miners by allowing miners to change some bytes on the coinbase transaction and consequently changing the Merkle root. Another reason is that some clients might be using services like transaction accelerators to speed up the commit time of a particular transaction. They pay the mining pool to use this service off-chain (i.e., with another cryptocurrency or via credit-cards) to, hopefully, increase the probability of their transactions get included in the next block. One example of this service is the BTC.com transaction accelerator.

jasode 6y ago

>Article asserts that bitcoin transactions should be processed in a more socialist "fair" ordering, as opposed to a more capitalist style "user pays" priority based system: You've mis-interpreted the article. The authors are saying the opposite. The paper is somewhat hard to read maybe because the 4 co-authors are from Germany so their English-as-2nd-language isn't the easiest to parse. For the specific paper, the authors are using "fair" to label fee-based-user-pays-priority which is the conventional expectation of how Bitcoin behaves. However, they analyzed a bunch Bitcoin transactions and noticed that priority based on "user pays" doesn't always happen. They're not exactly sure why but put forth some guesses. They considered that some miners might be "altruistic" (i.e. "socialist") to consider other attributes besides fee payment but they discount that. The other guess they feel is more realistic are "transaction accelerators" that don't broadcast the same blocks to every miner. Excerpt from section 7.1: >We hypothesize that mining pool operators might be sending a different set of transactions to each miner (or perhaps changing this set every a fixed time interval or event) to reduce the network overhead, avoiding miners to request a new task often. It is possible due to the stratum protocol. >Stratum is a pooled mining protocol that focuses on reducing network communication between the mining pool and its miners by allowing miners to change some bytes on the coinbase transaction and consequently changing the Merkle root. Another reason is that some clients might be using services like transaction accelerators to speed up the commit time of a particular transaction. They pay the mining pool to use this service off-chain (i.e., with another cryptocurrency or via credit-cards) to, hopefully, increase the probability of their transactions get included in the next block. One example of this service is the BTC.com transaction accelerator.