Bitcoin became one of the preferred payment methods for casino players who live in complicated gambling regions, such as USA and Australia. Of course, it could be argued that as a utxo-sharing protocol like lightning just compresses the number of payments per block space unit, it lowers the fees burden, thus making Bitcoin as a payment system far more attractive for a wider population of users. If we see the deployment of channel factories/payment pools, we might have users competing to spend a shared-utxo with different liquidity needs and thus ready to overbid. As the core of the network should start to be more busy, I think we should see more LN actors doing that kind of arbitrage, guaranteeing in the long-term mempools backlog. Further, if miners likely have an incentive to see an increase of on-chain activity, there is also the possibility that lightning will be so throughput-efficient to drain mempools backlog, to a point where the block demand is not high enough to pay back the cost of mining hardware and operational infrastructure. Is there a plausible example where the difference isn’t that marginal?
IMO, making the argument that small deltas in block reward gains aren’t that much relevant. Default to do so might provoke a latent centralization of mining due to heterogeneity in the block reward offered. Always accepting (package/descendent) fee rate increases removes the possibility of pinning entirely, I think I think the pinnings we’re affected with today are due to the ability of a malicious counterparty to halt the on-chain resolution of the channel. 300MB of ultra low fee rate txs. I think moving to replace-by-feerate allows the honest counterparty to fee-bump her commitment, thus offering a compelling block space demand, or forces the malicious counterparty to enter in a fee race. The presence of a pinning commitment transaction with low-chance of confirmation (abuse of BIP125 rule 3) prevents the honest counterparty to fee-bump her own version of the commitment, thus redeeming a HTLC before timelock expiration. One solution could be to have a per-party transaction “tag” and allocate a replacement slot in function ? That we have to think about replacement spam prevention sounds reasonable to me. In the state of today’s knowledge, this hypothesis sounds the most plausible.
That said, the delta sounds marginal enough w.r.t other factors of mining business units to not be worried (or at least low-key) about the potential implications on centralization. As of today, I think power efficiency of mining chips and access to affordable sources of energy are more significant factors of the rentability of mining operations rather than optimality of block construction/replacement policy. That said, the former factors might become a commodity, and the latter one become a competitive advantage. Lack of a “conflict pool” logic might make you lose income. This doesn’t necessarily make them dangerous, but it does mean you’ll have to accept some things that just aren’t the same as when you’re playing on a “legitimate” licensed casino that has all of your information. If you’d like to play at an anonymous casino, make sure you’re “signing up” at one with a good reputation. They can do as they wish and that might make them seem a bit more dangerous to play on. Can I get a no deposit casino bonus with Bitcoin?
£10. Applies to first deposit to Casino only. Still, I believe we might have to adopt more sophisticated replacement policies in the long term to level the field among the mining ecosystem if block construction/mempool acceptance strategies become a competitive factor. I would be more conservative about extending the conclusions to the medium/long-term future. The paradigm might change in the future. I believe we might have bandwidth-bleeding issues with our current replacement policy. I think it would be good to have a cost estimate of them and ensure a newer replacement policy would stay in the same bounds. I would be worried about utxo-based replacement limitations which could be abused in the context of multi-party protocol (introducing a new pinning vector). We have seen in the past mining actors behaviors delaying the adoption of protocol upgrades which were expected to encourage higher adoption of Bitcoin. Or at least not matching the return on mining investments expectations. This is making the assumption that the economic interests of the different class of actors in the Bitcoin ecosystem are not only well-understood but also aligned. Though, I would say it’s better to be cautious until we understand better the interactions between the different layers of the Bitcoin ecosystem ?
