Why are Bitcoin tx reliably gossiped around between nodes before they become part of the chain?
What is the incentive for me to spend my resources broadcasting someone else’s tx to other nodes when they’re not part of the winning chain?
In particular if you’re a miner wouldn’t it be *against* your self-interest to share knowledge of a not-yet-mined tx with your competitors?
Am I missing something? After 3+ years this is still a bit mysterious to me
@lucash_dev #1 reason is because people voluntarily donate their bandwidth to do so, on a huge scale.
...and re miners, small miners have an incentive for other miners to already know about the txs they're mining. Basically, blocks are sent around the network as lists of transactions these days, not the raw block. So the more txs in common, the faster they propagate.
(it's actually more complex than just txs lists - but what I said is basically correct)
@lucash_dev https://petertodd.org/2016/block-publication-incentives-for-miners
I don't really know of great resources covering this game theory stuff in detail frankly. It also doesn't help that there's a lot of dishonest academics and others with incentives to mislead people about how this stuff works, to promote their own coins.
@pete thx peter! can you point me to more resources on that (even just a technical term to search for in the code or google around)
I realize it’s a blind spot in my understanding of the protocol