How does Blind Merge Mining (BMM) work?
The idea is that Bitcoin miners blind On sidechain/spacechain merge mining.
In typical merged mining, Bitcoin miners who choose to participate must run nodes on separate blockchains (e.g. Namecoin, Rootstock, etc.), actually build blocks for those chains, and then include them somewhere in a Bitcoin block. do. For a detailed explanation, see https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/35870/1026.
Blind merge mining structures like Spacechains add a new role between Bitcoin and the parallel chain being merge mined. BMM miner.
BMM miners collect fees, build blocks on a parallel chain, and then submit the hashes for inclusion in Bitcoin. BMM transaction. They pay fees to Bitcoin miners in BTC. Bitcoin miners can include these hashes and collect fees without having to worry about the meaning of the hashes, without having to run nodes on this parallel chain.
Competition between multiple BMM miners is expected to drive the BTC fees paid on BMM transactions up to essentially the same amount as the fees collected by parallel chains.
The most difficult part of implementing such a protocol is ensuring that Bitcoin miners do not include more than one BMM hash for the same parallel chain of the same Bitcoin block. This is bad for the following reasons:
- Parallel chains can be messy. For example, determining which blocks are valid requires tricky and confusing rules.
- That’s a waste. Bitcoin block space will be used for no purpose.
- This undermines the goal of converting fees collected on parallel chains into BTC paid directly to Bitcoin miners. There is no atomicity guarantee between paying the BMM transaction fee and actually accepting a valid block on the parallel chain, so there is no incentive for this. Competing BMM miners bid BTC fees up to the amount received from the parallel chain.
There are several ways to achieve this atomicity guarantee, such as Ruben Somsen’s BMM/Spacechain proposal and BIP-301/Drivechain proposal.
