This piece is more academic than popular, but worth sharing as it is the first formal mathematical rebuttal to the implicit criticism of Bitcoin made in the well-known 2011/2012 paper "On Bitcoin and Red Balloons". For those who haven't read that paper, it basically argued for the formal impossibility of creating a sybil-proof L1 routing network.
Worth noting for the that this question is about whether you can get nodes to share transactions without adding unnecessary hops (i.e. disincentivize "private mempools") and is a fundamentally different topic from the more-commonly discussed topic of whether block production is sybil-resistant and whether POW and POS have the same kinds of sybil-resistance, etc. The focus here is on whether it is possible to add payouts to P2P network nodes to incentivize the volunteers that run the network without creating a massive security problem that eats the network.
https://github.com/SaitoTech/papers/blob/main/sybil/A_Simple_Proof_of_Sybil_Proof_Lancashire-Parris_2023.pdfBitcoin does not currently have cryptographic routing signatures so it would need to be modified or upgraded, but it is an interesting approach. Thoughts and discussion very welcome.
