New problematic issue with exploiting the gap between standardness relay policies & consensus has emerged.
It’s become trendy on BTC for miners to include (non standard) sub 1 sat / vByte transactions in large batches (driven by Ordinals/Inscriptions demand, and a regular lack of competing “regular” transactions at 1 sat+ rates). Note: Bitcoin Core is currently 85 ish% of the network, Knots has grown to about 16%, although in this case I don’t believe there is a policy distinction (yet, it may be imminent). Regardless, because these transactions are outside Bitcoin Core policy, lots of node operators (including miners presumably) have to backfill these unheard transactions after a new block filled with them is published. This has massively reduced the benefit of compact blocks, as requesting maybe 10kb of new transactions has in some cases shot as high as 0.8 MB.
The Bitcoin Core plan is to lower the min relay fee for standard transactions, which is probably a good response, albeit 1) it’s kind of avoiding the greater issue that BTC is not only failing to drive the needed “oil tanker” fees to sustain security budget in the long run on a tiny blocksize it’s actually moving in the opposite direction with increasingly lower fees and 2) it’s upset the Knots filter guys who are becoming increasingly aware of the hijacking now that their desired filter changes to block Inscriptions are being continually ignored while filter changes to facilitate Inscriptions are being fasttracked.
In any case, the upshot for us is that this seems to be another data point that shrinking the gap between policy & consensus is a good idea to avoid this fragmentation of mempools encouraged by varying relay policies and/or incentives for miners to include non-standard/widely unheard transactions.
Edit: One line summary that this is a BIG impact
In June, we were requesting less than 10 kB worth of transactions per block on average for about 40-50% of blocks. Now, we are requesting close to 0.8 MB worth of transactions per block on average for about 70% of blocks.
This is a misunderstanding of the situation. The implication seems to be that if all policy rules become consensus rules that this issue would not exist.
Maybe so, but minimum relay fee being consensus is the natural result of that thought process. And that can’t be the intention.
Furthermore, relay rules are not limited in any way to fee level. The inclusion of certain op-returns has been a debate on BTC and is a relay rule too.
In Bitcoin Cash I expect a lot of innovation to happen on the side of the mining software where they pick and choose what to include. For instance higher days-destroyed may allow lower fees.
So, this is a misinterpretation of the issue.
But more importantly the solution has been known for some years, it’s just that nobody has implemented it yet. See;
