Bitcoin Miner MEV

[igorsyl]

Starting a discussion about growing incidence of Bitcoin Miner MEV

Initial discussion: https://discord.com/channels/621759717756370964/728030782693834862/1085274251944284290

[badonyx]

One of the top 4 Bitcoin mining pools is removing block commit transactions from other STX miners and submitting their own when they win BTC blocks, in order to win easy STX block rewards without any significant PoX commitment. This only works some of the time however since the other miners mostly continue building off of the old tip.

This results in inefficiencies in either scenario:

• Transient consensus failures, where the MEV block is forked away, denying their block reward but also resulting in a reorg and denying Stacks consensus from settling on that Bitcoin block.
• Successful MEV but other miners waste their block commitments on a dead fork in a subsequent block.

[badonyx]

At time of writing the MEV miner has made 775 block commit transactions, 591 of which were in blocks including only their own PoX transaction, while winning only 166 block rewards. The remainder indicates transient consensus failure at rate of at least 72% per MEV block (which they win between 10-15% of the time).

[friedger]

The current MEV miner does not care about tx fees and does not include any txs.

[badonyx]

This is not true.

[friedger]

Good to see!

[igorsyl]

This topic was discussed in today's (2023-03-17) Blockchain Architecture Meeting. Meeting Notes.

[jcnelson]

Let's get this ball rolling: https://forum.stacks.org/t/rfc-minimum-bid-pox-to-thwart-bitcoin-mev/14675