Nearly-zero cost attack scenario on Optimistic Rollup

In a world in which censorship-based attacks like this are a serious threat it might be worthwhile to pre-coordinate some potential social defences. For example, you might have a general agreement that an anti-censorship UASF should take place to force the blockchain to include transactions (or replacements with the same address+nonce) which:

  • Pay 5x more than typical gas prices for that period (I’m not sure quite how you’d specify this part)
  • Have been published for 24 hours, 24 hours previously, in one of the Bitcoin blockchain, Twitter with a particular hashtag and the New York Times

In uncensored conditions it would be possible for any non-attacking miner to mine these transactions profitably during the 24 hours between the trigger and the fork, and people intending to execute the UASF would want to make sure the transactions in question were widely shared through other channels so that other people joined them in their defence. So although there are potentially ways to game the coordination process to cause disruption by tinkering with later editions of the New York Times or whatever to make it ambiguous whether the conditions were met, they only risk forking the chain if there’s actually a successful censorship attack in progress.

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