Censorship Resistant Transaction Relay - Taking out the garbage(man)

The discussion highlights the technical challenges and economic impracticalities facing Ocean, a mining entity with less than 1% hash power, in their attempt to reorganize blocks within the Bitcoin blockchain. The core of the argument revolves around the inherent difficulty for such a miner to successfully execute a block reorganization due to Bitcoin Core's protocol of accepting the first block it sees at a given height. For Ocean to replace a "spam" block, it would need to discover not just one, but two consecutive blocks before any other miner manages to find one. Given the statistical improbability of this occurrence—estimated at roughly 0.01% per attempt—it becomes clear why the endeavor is nearly impossible without incurring prohibitive costs.

This situation is further compounded by the financial aspect of mining blocks on the Bitcoin network, where each block carries a significant reward, approximately valued at $300,000. Considering these stakes, the expectation for Ocean to expend tens of millions of dollars in hash power to potentially remove a single undesired block from the network appears both unreasonable and economically unfeasible. Such an investment would not only require a substantial amount of resources but also offers no guarantee of success, highlighting the inefficacy of attempting to force a block reorganization under these conditions. The detailed exploration of these technical and economic barriers sheds light on the complexities and limitations miners face within the Bitcoin ecosystem, emphasizing the robustness of its underlying protocols against unilateral actions by entities with minimal hash power. For more insights, Peter Todd's website provides further reading on related topics.