Relax OP_RETURN standardness restrictions
Posted by Greg Maxwell
May 7, 2025/11:32 UTC
The email discusses a specific strategy known as a withholding attack within the context of Bitcoin development. This tactic involves announcing a blockchain block while intentionally omitting some transactions from it. Although blocks do get relayed to other full nodes before their complete validation, for the strategy to be effective, all nodes must possess the necessary data. The technique aims to delay the mining process on the recipient's end until the validation of the withheld transactions occurs. However, this approach only minimally reduces the hop-by-hop component of transaction relay because the recipient likely does not have the transaction either, given its relay is blocked in the network, and the transaction is submitted directly to the party that included it in their block.
The email also mentions that while there are several potential optimizations to mitigate the impact of such withholding attacks, these would require significant development work. More importantly, none of these potential solutions would be as effective as possessing and pre-validating the transaction data. This implies a significant effort must be made in development to address these challenges effectively.
TLDR
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