delvingbitcoin

Merging incomparable linearizations

Merging incomparable linearizations

Original Postby ajtowns

Posted on: November 28, 2023 08:12 UTC

The discussion focuses on optimizing transaction processing by challenging and proposing amendments to an existing assumption regarding the ordering and feerate (fee rate) of transactions.

The original assumption that the highest chunk feerate of bad transactions does not exceed a certain value is critiqued for its retrospective nature, suggesting instead that it would be more practical to assume the first chunk's feerate does not surpass this threshold from the outset. This change aims to facilitate preliminary checks rather than post-process validations.

Further examination introduces the concept of topological validity in transaction sets, emphasizing the necessity of including all parental transactions in a sequence to maintain integrity; for instance, if a transaction spends from another, which in turn spends from a third, all must be included in the valid order without skipping generations. This principle underpins the argument that if one set of transactions is topologically valid, then any permutation or addition maintaining the parental order also preserves this validity.

The conversation then shifts towards a technical suggestion for reorganizing transactions to enhance the process. By prioritizing transactions with good feerates at the beginning of the sorting process and ensuring that subsequent chunks maintain or increase the feerate, the method seeks to optimize the transaction flow. If a chunk's feerate falls below a predefined threshold or fails to include all targeted transactions, the system adjusts by moving the higher-feerate transactions to an earlier position, thus potentially altering their chunk assignment in favor of efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

A nuanced point raised involves the linearization of transactions based on their feerates, demonstrating through a hypothetical example that reordering transactions according to their feerate can lead to a configuration where the intended "good" transactions do not commence the sequence as expected due to the discovery of a chunk with a higher feerate. This observation suggests that while reordering can improve the placement of transactions with favorable feerates, the outcome may not always align perfectly with initial expectations, indicating the complexity and dynamic nature of managing transaction feerates and orders within this framework.