Uncrowdable Inclusion Lists: The Tension between Chain Neutrality, Preconfirmations and Proposer Commitments

[Julian]

A main idea of this post is to recognize that the specific design that is chosen for inclusion lists (unconditional, cumulative, COMIS, etc.) means that certain use cases can more easily be realized via these inclusion lists designs than via others.

It is important to choose a design that induces the allocation rule that the community desires. If we want to make inclusion lists that uphold chain neutrality, we must make sure that they are not used for other profit-driven purposes.

Creating explicit additional incentives to follow the allocation rule that the protocol wishes is a related but not identical topic. In this post, we discuss a method of achieving explicit incentives for upholding chain neutrality in the following paragraph.

@Julian

First, by giving tips from transactions that are executed via the IL, we can reward the IL proposer for providing a valuable service of chain neutrality. Here, we would consider a transaction executed via the IL if the transaction is in the IL but not in the main block body of any earlier block. This is good for the proposer as it closes the welfare gap between using the IL for censorship resistance and for other purposes: the IL is more uncrowdable. Moreover, it is also good for the user because it allows them to pay for this service, conditional on the transaction not being included in any other way. This may be more difficult to do out-of-protocol.

It is difficult for the protocol to be aware of the quality of the inclusion list as it can only ascertain which transactions are censored by observing the IL. Out-of-protocol, I imagine we can get more insights, for example with websites like https://www.censorship.pics/.