What happens if pools try to maximize fees by congesting the network?

[BlackHatCoiner]

the obvious way. by pools not including your transaction unless your fee meets their desired minimum..

This is not how the free market works. Eventually, there will be pools willing to include my transaction if it only constitutes profit. For example, if they do have a few transactions paying 1 sat/vb, and choose not to include them, and mine empty blocks, then at some point, there will be some miner who will. It will only be loss for them. Simple economics; supply and demand and of block space.

[1714500572]

1714500572

[1714500572]

1714500572

[1714500572]

1714500572

[1714500572]

1714500572

[Synchronice]

Honestly, I had never thought about this before, or at least I don't remember thinking about it.

Say that Foundry USA, AntPool and F2Pool (which in total hold about 69% of the hash rate according to btc.com) cooperated to pretend there's network congestion, when there isn't. For example, say the median fee is 1 sat/vb. But, they don't like that, so they broadcast a thousand transactions paying 5-10 sat/vb, to encourage some of the users with 1 sat/vb to raise their fee rate. Pools' transactions don't cost them anything, because they don't include them into their candidate blocks. They just take advantage of the wallet software there exists which tells the user to pay more to have priority.

This isn't limited to when there isn't congestion. Pools could do this right now with Ordinals, and broadcast transactions with 100 sat/vb; that would encourage those paying 50 sat/vb to raise fees. To avoid other pools from including their transactions (and pay 100 sat/vb which is pretty high), they could sometime include a transaction that invalidates their attractive transactions (e.g., spends an UTXO from those).

A problem, from the pool owners' side, is that they can get caught easily for doing it. Every person running a full node will notice unreasonable activity (the miner not including tx that pay much), and blocks mined by pools are known.

To be honest, it's entirely possible even for one man to clog the whole bitcoin mempool with some tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, depends how long do you want to ruin the party and then depends if that lit turns into fire.

Just small statistics before I show you an example:

• Roughly 6 blocks are mined each hour.
• Roughly 2600 bitcoin transactions are confirmed in one block, that means 16K transactions are confirmed an hour.

For example, make 32,000 transactions offline with 100,000 sat/vB and broadcast them all at once. You are gonna clog the whole bitcoin mempool for 2 hours, guaranteed!
By the way, those big mining companies aren't good guys, they manipulate transaction fees, sometimes. They can cooperate too but if they cooperate, this will destroy the whole bitcoin ecosystem and there will be no winner in this game.

[franky1]

To be honest, it's entirely possible even for one man to clog the whole bitcoin mempool with some tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, depends how long do you want to ruin the party and then depends if that lit turns into fire.

Just small statistics before I show you an example:

• Roughly 6 blocks are mined each hour.
• Roughly 2600 bitcoin transactions are confirmed in one block, that means 16K transactions are confirmed an hour.

For example, make 32,000 transactions offline with 0.001 sat/vB and broadcast them all at once. You are gonna clog the whole bitcoin mempool for 2 hours, guaranteed!
By the way, those big mining companies aren't good guys, they manipulate transaction fees, sometimes. They can cooperate too but if they cooperate, this will destroy the whole bitcoin ecosystem and there will be no winner in this game.

you dont need to clog the mempool of users to cause fee mania. as proven dozens of times over the years.. the mempool clog of users nodes is the reaction not the cause.
the cause is what pools allow into their blocks

and by the way.. 32,000tx of tx that are ~250bytes. meaning 0.25btc a tx meaning 8000BTC for a 2 hour non event that dissipates after two hors thus wasted 8k btc for a non event..

unlike other fee mania methods involving transactions that do get into blocks. thus can cost a pool nothing if organised right. and can sustain for far far longer

mining pools dont need to first attack users mempools to cause fee mania

however if the topic was "what if core try to maximize fees by congesting the network?!"
then the answer would be doing what they are already doing by messing with the users mempool and relay limits to reject/prune cheap fee's to never reach a pool, causing everyone to pay more just to get seen by a pool

[BlackHatCoiner]

For example, make 32,000 transactions offline with 0.001 sat/vB and broadcast them all at once.

First of all, 32,000 transactions which pay 0.001 sat/vb isn't a problem. Even if full nodes didn't deny to propagate your transactions, they'd have the least priority. My hypothetical attack is all about pretending there are people paying for priority (when there aren't). Secondly, 0.001 sat/vb is so low, that your transactions will probably never reach the miner. (unless you drop them a message, and then again, I don't think they'd accept as it's really strange)

[Synchronice]

you dont need to clog the mempool of users to cause fee mania. as proven dozens of times over the year.. the mempool clog is the reaction not the cause.

and by the way.. 32,000tx of tx that are ~250bytes. meaning 0.25btc a tx meaning 8000BTC for a 2 hour non event that dissipates after two hors thus wasted 8k btc for a non event..

unlike other fee mania methods involving transactions that do get into blocks. thus can cost a pool nothing if organised right. and can sustain for far far longer

Why 250 bytes? Let's take 142 bytes. I made a typo, should have written 100 sat, sorry.
Totally, transaction fee per the smallest transaction would be 0.00011BTC, i.e. 3.52 Bitcoin totally (0.00011 * 32,000). At the moment it will clog mempool because fees are low but 200 sat/byte or 400 sat/byte is no joke for anyone.

For example, make 32,000 transactions offline with 0.001 sat/vB and broadcast them all at once.

First of all, 32,000 transactions which pay 0.001 sat/vb isn't a problem. Even if full nodes didn't deny to propagate your transactions, they'd have the least priority. My hypothetical attack is all about pretending there are people paying for priority (when there aren't). Secondly, 0.001 sat/vb is so low, that your transactions will probably never reach the miner. (unless you drop them a message, and then again, I don't think they'd accept as it's really strange)

It was a typo, sorry. I already wrote above and edited my post.

[Wind_FURY]

I think that even if collusion to engineer a congestion was technically possible, how does that play out in those pool's long term expectation to get incentivized? Such a thing cannot be hidden forever, and the discovery of collusion/dishonesty would make the participants lose confidence in the system, which would probably also make them leave and cause a price crash.

From a game theory point of view, it's better for the pools to do what's best for themselves, but also act honestly and do what's best for the rest of network.

because when pools force thousands of users to pay more. the pools can ramp down their own high fee tx's to themselves and and instead let high fee users fill the gap. thus making the users then persist the fee mania

EG
imagine the next 18 blocks are transactions of high fee's of pools sending transactions to themselves in their own block templates thus paying the fees back to themselves.. causing fees to show as 60sat/byte minimum.. without costiong the pools anything..

then users will see a 60sat/byte minimum for last 3 hours and so realise if they want to get a tx to confirm within 3 hours(3x(6blocks/hour)=18) then they need to pay that minimum

then when the pools see normal users paying 60sat/byte minimum they allow those transactions in and not include one of their own. ramping fown their own tx involvement becasue now the users tx start to persist the attack for them.. thus they continue letting in users transactions as long as users pay 60sat/byte min

again by pools not zero-confirm relaying their own tx and only including them in their own block template. it stops competing pools stealing their fee's and thus costs the attacker pools nothing to do this, with just a 3 hour of no external fee income until they can push the fee estimates up to the min amount for users to then pay the pools this higher fee consistantly

I'm not debating if they can or cannot do it. I'm merely asking if it's sustainable, and if the pools can actually get away with such dishonesty towards the community. How long until the developers, the users and the economic majority, and the honest miners and pools come together to find a way to kick those pools out of the network? It might start another movement within the community again.

Would the top mining pools take the risk for temporary additional profit? Or will they take the game theoretically smart approach and simply be honest?

[franky1]

I'm not debating if they can or cannot do it. I'm merely asking if it's sustainable, and if the pools can actually get away with such dishonesty towards the community. How long until the developers, the users and the economic majority, and the honest miners and pools come together to find a way to kick those pools out of the network? It might start another movement within the community again.

Would the top mining pools take the risk for temporary additional profit? Or will they take the game theoretically smart approach and simply be honest?

imagine this scenario

for 18 blocks the total fee is 10sat/byte. meaning an average block is 0.15btc in total fees for 1.5mb block
meaning over 3 hours they get 2.7btc

now imagine for the next 18 blocks the pools collude by creating their own self confirming transaction paying to their own destination where because they do not broadcast pre-confirm to the network. they are the sole includer of their transaction in their block meaning their fees come back to themselves. so no cost
the asics of their pools still get shares of the main 6.25btc so they are happy

and now the colluding pools create a 3 hour situation of only including fees of 40sat/byte of their own self paying transactions)again reminder NO COST)
thus in that 3 hours . USERS start to see delays in users getting confirmations and so users start to do RBF to increase their fee to 40sat+/byte min

now the pools dont have to fill their blocks with only their own transactions when users are now starting to pay that minimum.. so they can include some of there own and users transactions of 40sat/byte plus until its majority users transactions of 40sat/byte tx in a block

now they are starting to earn again from users. but still ensuring they set min confirm fee of 40sat/byte. which continues to make users pay that amount.

and soon you are realising when user pay this amount, the pool is getting 10.8btc per 3 hours instead of 2.7btc and the pool does not have to bloat a block with their own transactions becasue now the users are paying their collusion high fee requirement

as for "can the network stop this"
arnt you part of the idiot-speak cult group that dont want to stop high fee's.. you know the guys that want cheap fees rejected unconfirmed and want a "freemarket" of paying premium..
arnt you also part of the same idiot brigade that doesnt want to reject dishonest stuff.. such as ordinals scams that has caused a fee mania via a different technique but your cult wants to continue

yes technically there are many ways to stop it but i am 100% sure your cult and the core devs wont implement it

[Wind_FURY]

I'm not debating if they can or cannot do it. I'm merely asking if it's sustainable, and if the pools can actually get away with such dishonesty towards the community. How long until the developers, the users and the economic majority, and the honest miners and pools come together to find a way to kick those pools out of the network? It might start another movement within the community again.

Would the top mining pools take the risk for temporary additional profit? Or will they take the game theoretically smart approach and simply be honest?

imagine this scenario

for 18 blocks the total fee is 10sat/byte. meaning an average block is 0.15btc in total fees for 1.5mb block
meaning over 3 hours they get 2.7btc

now imagine for the next 18 blocks the pools collude by creating their own self confirming transaction paying to their own destination where because they do not broadcast pre-confirm to the network. they are the sole includer of their transaction in their block meaning their fees come back to themselves. so no cost
the asics of their pools still get shares of the main 6.25btc so they are happy

and now the colluding pools create a 3 hour situation of only including fees of 40sat/byte of their own self paying transactions)again reminder NO COST)
thus in that 3 hours . USERS start to see delays in users getting confirmations and so users start to do RBF to increase their fee to 40sat+/byte min

now the pools dont have to fill their blocks with only their own transactions when users are now starting to pay that minimum.. so they can include some of there own and users transactions of 40sat/byte plus until its majority users transactions of 40sat/byte tx in a block

now they are starting to earn again from users. but still ensuring they set min confirm fee of 40sat/byte. which continues to make users pay that amount.

and soon you are realising when user pay this amount, the pool is getting 10.8btc per 3 hours instead of 2.7btc and the pool does not have to bloat a block with their own transactions becasue now the users are paying their collusion high fee requirement

I already told you, I'm not debating what they can or cannot do technically. I'm already asking under the assumption that they can do it.

as for "can the network stop this"

arnt you part of the idiot-speak cult group that dont want to stop high fee's.. you know the guys that want cheap fees rejected unconfirmed and want a "freemarket" of paying premium..

arnt you also part of the same idiot brigade that doesnt want to reject dishonest stuff.. such as ordinals scams that has caused a fee mania via a different technique but your cult wants to continue

yes technically there are many ways to stop it but i am 100% sure your cult and the core devs wont implement it

Hey franknbeans, there's a massive difference between the scaling debate and what was at stake during that era, and what's being discussed in the hypothetical situation that OP is asking.

It's a valid question. How sustainable is it when the community sees such dishonesty, and what assurances are there that the miners will continue pointing their hashing power towards dishonest pools?

[BlackHatCoiner]

Just for clarity: any post related to "cult groups" and "Bitcoin Core dev team" derails the thread and will be deleted.

[stompix]

Both parent and child transactions are unconfirmed, and the high-paying one is the child, so to invalidate the big one, you only need to double-spend the parent. So, you could pretend the mempool is clogged up, but you'd only need to mine one small transaction for invalidating every big child transaction.

Invalidating transactions it will mean it will be dropped out of every single node mempool, so leaving the mempool empty again.
If you try to force the chain of child and parents to remain unconfirmed by a low fee from either of them it will bring the other transactions fee down also.So you can have 1000 tx with 200sat/b if you want to get them stuck like this by having either a parent or child with 1 sat/b it will still bring the average fees down also, so you will be having 1001 tx with  20 or whatever sat per byte and every mempool explorer will see that.

You can't get a valid traction that pays over the next block limit stuck in the mempool, there is no way for that other than all miners blacklisting them.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Invalidating transactions it will mean it will be dropped out of every single node mempool, so leaving the mempool empty again.

But that would be late. People would have raised their fee rate, and they won't be able to lower it, which is what's this attack all about.

So you can have 1000 tx with 200sat/b if you want to get them stuck like this by having either a parent or child with 1 sat/b it will still bring the average fees down also

How so? The parent transaction is meaningless in size, comparably to the children. If you have 1000 tx paying 200 sat/vb, and 1 tx paying 1 sat/vb, it's obviously in favor of the miner to include all 201. Why would the explorer show 20 sat/vb?

[stompix]

Invalidating transactions it will mean it will be dropped out of every single node mempool, so leaving the mempool empty again.

But that would be late. People would have raised their fee rate, and they won't be able to lower it, which is what's this attack all about.

If you allow enough time before invalidating it you risk another miner mining them just 5 seconds after so you just lose money and achieve zero.

How so? The parent transaction is meaningless in size, comparably to the children. If you have 1000 tx paying 200 sat/vb, and 1 tx paying 1 sat/vb, it's obviously in favor of the miner to include all 201. Why would the explorer show 20 sat/vb?

20 was just a thrown-out number because I didn't know the size of the parent, but still no!
The most important thing is that you're trying this to block the tx from getting confirmed but at the same time rise the median fee of the next block and it doesn't work:
- if you throw like you said 201 tx with the above fees they will simply get confirmed in the next block and the rest of the fees in the mempool will have no time to pick up, but you just wasted 1 btc to the competition
- if you push 1000 highly paid tx at 200sat/b and you try chain them to the mempool forever with parents twice their size but with 1 sats the mempool will not show 200sat/vb since that tx are ~66at/b and they will still get confirmed as they wills till be the first in line.

Either you try to maximize the fees and you risk having them confirmed in minutes, or you either chain them by reducing their overall fees in which case they will obviously not raise the mempool fee average or next block fees.
Again, you can't rise the fees for the next block estimation without putting their tx that will get confirmed in the next block, so gifting bitcoins to other mners for nothing!

It will be far easier to just mine for like 12 hours empty blocks blaming some glitch and then "solve' the issue!

[franky1]

i find it strange how blackhat makes a topic about mining pool mangers colluding to attempt to raise the fee's .. via a blackhat stupid scenario method of messing with users mempools..

the  easiest, fastest cheapest option is just have them mining pool managers just select exclusively high tx fee's especially ones they include to themselves thus no real cost to themselves thus they end up setting the min fee the network sees as what gets into the next block majority of the time

all of this chatter about needing to mess with users mempools becomes meaningless and can cause excess cost to pools who stupidly would broadcast tx's with fees to the network unconfirmed as it allows the non colluding pools to pick them up along with users other cheap fee tx.

i think blackhatcoiner was told a stupid scheme by a buddy he knows, but doesnt understand the process himself..  and is asking the community how effective it is and ignoring the basics of how bitcoin actually works to not understand how futile his scenario is in comparison to much easier and cheaper and more effective methods

in short. pools dont need to mess with users nodes database of zero-confirm transactions..
pools just choose to only include high fees in their own blocktemplates.. job done

edit to respond to below

the  easiest, fastest cheapest option is just have them mining pool managers just select exclusively high tx fee's especially ones they include to themselves thus no real cost

Don't free market principles apply to frankland-utopia?

dont you understand that your forum wife pretends to spout "freemarket" like a libertarian loyalist(when he is on a recruitment drive to find people to adore him).. but he is really just playing you.. because its a false excuse to make everyone pay more.. and there is no actual free market..

heck when you ignore his pretend libertarian recruitment buzzwords and listen to what he says once he thinks he has enough recruits for the week. he changes his narrative..
EG when he adores the fee mania and wants people to pay more.. thats capitalism not libertarian freemarket
and no capitalism is not a freemarket stereotype

try not to rely on your forum wifes buzzwords. actually take some time to learn how bitcoin works

[BlackHatCoiner]

If you allow enough time before invalidating it you risk another miner mining them just 5 seconds after so you just lose money and achieve zero.

Sure, but with majority of hash rate, you'd expect to mine yours more often than the rest of the miners. But maybe you're right; maybe that risk outweighs the benefit, it's just seems to me that in times when the network is clogged up, raising the high fee by a lot could outweigh the risk.

- if you push 1000 highly paid tx at 200sat/b and you try chain them to the mempool forever with parents twice their size but with 1 sats the mempool will not show 200sat/vb since that tx are ~66at/b and they will still get confirmed as they wills till be the first in line.

Parents don't need to be large at all. Think of a parent that is double-spent, whose children are Ordinals.

the  easiest, fastest cheapest option is just have them mining pool managers just select exclusively high tx fee's especially ones they include to themselves thus no real cost

Don't free market principles apply to frankland-utopia?

[dragonvslinux]

Your topic has certainly identified a key weakness in Bitcoin's centralisation as a network. Few people want to acknowledge it, but even the idea of "mining pools" as a concept is a form of centralisation that was controversial in the early days and still remains a threat today, with a few pools holding the majority of the hash power as you pointed out. All it would take is collusion either way for malicious activity. The one reason pools became accepted and popular is because they were more profitable, as well as obviously allowed access to the market for individuals with low hash rate that would rarely ever gain any block rewards otherwise.

It all reminds me how Ethereum has recently become centralised, whereas the system was designed in an attempt to further decentralise it. Whereas similarly there are just a few pools that dominate and could easily collude for malicious activity. Maybe people don't like the comparison, but given how much maxi's accuse Ethereum of being centralised (rightly so), they do so without looking in a mirror over Bitcoin's centralisation.

[Wind_FURY]

Your topic has certainly identified a key weakness in Bitcoin's centralisation as a network. Few people want to acknowledge it, but even the idea of "mining pools" as a concept is a form of centralisation that was controversial in the early days and still remains a threat today, with a few pools holding the majority of the hash power as you pointed out.

I don't believe that there's only a "few people" who want to acknowledge it. Mining pools are centralizing, but it's part of the evolution of the participants in looking for more efficient methods to do their job for the network as well, like the development of ASICs. It's unpreventable, especially ASICs.

But there are developers like Matt Corallo who is developing BetterHash, which would give back the miners control over their hashing power, and pools would be mere coordinators and distributors of mining rewards.

All it would take is collusion either way for malicious activity. The one reason pools became accepted and popular is because they were more profitable, as well as obviously allowed access to the market for individuals with low hash rate that would rarely ever gain any block rewards otherwise.

It wouldn't be that simple because everything is about the incentives and being incentivized. Would a group of miners/pools really want to attack the network and risk to be kicked out of it? Or would they prefer to be honest, keep mining Bitcoin, and be rewarded for it?

[DannyHamilton]

Wouldn't the remaining 31% of the hash rate include those 10 sat/vb transactions in their blocks?

. . . the 69% could invalidate them at any time, and at a very low cost . . .

Furthermore, can Foundry, Antpool, and F2Pool really trust each other?

That's open for debate, but I don't expect a decentralized network to rely on mutual decisions made by three for-profit organizations. Eventually, there may be benefits outweighing the principles.

If 69% of the hashpower is going to successfully collude to control which transactions are valid and which aren't, then there is no need to waste time and effort spamming the network with fake transactions. With more than 50% of the hashpower, they have full control over which transactions are in blocks and which aren't.  They can simply choose the transactions that pay very high fees, overwrite any block from any other pool or miner that doesn't do the same.

[Ucy]

I think someone or people who are smart enough to to control that much hash rate won't be too dumb to know that this won't be economically viable long-term unless they aren't motivated by profit but to attack the network.
If that happens, many "customers" will likely go somewhere else where transaction is cheap or stop using the network all together and demand will reduce making the transaction fees to become low again... This could happen in just two weeks. Will they be willing to risk more than 1month of low demand for just 2weeks of illegally hiking the fees?

[Renampun]

Honestly, I had never thought about this before, or at least I don't remember thinking about it.

Say that Foundry USA, AntPool and F2Pool (which in total hold about 69% of the hash rate according to btc.com) cooperated to pretend there's network congestion, when there isn't. For example, say the median fee is 1 sat/vb. But, they don't like that, so they broadcast a thousand transactions paying 5-10 sat/vb, to encourage some of the users with 1 sat/vb to raise their fee rate. Pools' transactions don't cost them anything, because they don't include them into their candidate blocks. They just take advantage of the wallet software there exists which tells the user to pay more to have priority.

This isn't limited to when there isn't congestion. Pools could do this right now with Ordinals, and broadcast transactions with 100 sat/vb; that would encourage those paying 50 sat/vb to raise fees. To avoid other pools from including their transactions (and pay 100 sat/vb which is pretty high), they could sometime include a transaction that invalidates their attractive transactions (e.g., spends an UTXO from those).

A problem, from the pool owners' side, is that they can get caught easily for doing it. Every person running a full node will notice unreasonable activity (the miner not including tx that pay much), and blocks mined by pools are known.

maybe for a while pools are happy that there is congestion on the network because the fees are going up, but this is only temporary, it will not be possible for them to maintain this for long considering that it will take quite a lot of resources for them and with increasing transaction fees will also discourage people from using bitcoin and that will disrupt the market.

so even though they want the fees on the network to go up so that the rewards they get are also high, they also have the thought that this will slow down the adoption of bitcoin and annoy people on the network, for example like in the case of yesterday's Ordinal where Bitcoin fees didn't make sense and pools seems to be enjoying this.

[Blitzboy]

Honestly, I had never thought about this before, or at least I don't remember thinking about it.

Say that Foundry USA, AntPool and F2Pool (which in total hold about 69% of the hash rate according to btc.com) cooperated to pretend there's network congestion, when there isn't. For example, say the median fee is 1 sat/vb. But, they don't like that, so they broadcast a thousand transactions paying 5-10 sat/vb, to encourage some of the users with 1 sat/vb to raise their fee rate. Pools' transactions don't cost them anything, because they don't include them into their candidate blocks. They just take advantage of the wallet software there exists which tells the user to pay more to have priority.

This isn't limited to when there isn't congestion. Pools could do this right now with Ordinals, and broadcast transactions with 100 sat/vb; that would encourage those paying 50 sat/vb to raise fees. To avoid other pools from including their transactions (and pay 100 sat/vb which is pretty high), they could sometime include a transaction that invalidates their attractive transactions (e.g., spends an UTXO from those).

A problem, from the pool owners' side, is that they can get caught easily for doing it. Every person running a full node will notice unreasonable activity (the miner not including tx that pay much), and blocks mined by pools are known.

maybe for a while pools are happy that there is congestion on the network because the fees are going up, but this is only temporary, it will not be possible for them to maintain this for long considering that it will take quite a lot of resources for them and with increasing transaction fees will also discourage people from using bitcoin and that will disrupt the market.

so even though they want the fees on the network to go up so that the rewards they get are also high, they also have the thought that this will slow down the adoption of bitcoin and annoy people on the network, for example like in the case of yesterday's Ordinal where Bitcoin fees didn't make sense and pools seems to be enjoying this.

Theoretically, yes, major mining pools could orchestrate such a scheme, artificially inflating transaction fees. But, lets pull back a bit and examine the broader landscape.

This strategy would be tantamount to shooting themselves in the foot. Sure, they may enjoy a short-term windfall from higher fees, but what about the long-term implications? Higher fees could discourage Bitcoin usage, possibly damaging the very ecosystem they rely on. Not to mention, any noticeable shift in transaction patterns could raise alarm bells among observant network participants.

Moreover, such a tactic would require a level of cooperation that's practically unrealistic. Remember, these pools are competitors in a cutthroat industry; the incentives for defection are strong.