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Comment by mgerullis | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible to send out transactions without sending them to the mempool?

yes, you can email it to your miner buddy.

it's possible to spot such transactions if they violate transaction forwarding rules (aka standardness rules) but not consensus rules. for example, a transaction greater than 100kB is not standard but still valid.

I've build a tool to detect differences between _my local_ mempool and what miners include in their block (there will always be slight differences). This is primarily intended to detect censorship, but can also detect transactions that never entered _my_ mempool.

See https://miningpool.observer

Brilliant! I remember thinking about this problem a few years back: what stops miners of a blockchain just ignoring transactions/anything from certain entities. So it's good that there exists a way to track such behaviour, if it is occurring.

Economics. If miners consistently ignore certain transactions, there is space for new miners to enter the market and earn super-normal profit. After the next difficulty adjustment cycle, the old, censoring miners may be priced out.

This is really neat. Have you thought about trying to bundle it as an app that can be downloaded on umbrel?

Yes! Will be on umbrel eventually. Currently needs a Bitcoin Core build from the master branch. The features use should be in the upcoming release. Then Umbrel!

Looking forward to it!

Yeah but wouldn’t it require some kind of fork of the BTC software (not chain) to actually include this transaction without sending it to everyone else?

The transaction is valid to all miners, it just isn't shared with the network until your buddy finds a block that includes it.

Law enforcement watches the mempool, they can spot such transactions anyway because they know it didn't ever show up in their mempool logs.

Ok but is it really illegal? I doubt there’s a law on who can send who private BTC transactions? Or is it actually possible to mark this as laundering?

There's nothing illegal here. The goal of privacy is to avoid giving anyone a reason to suspect something. In the case of money laundering specifically, you want to turn money that looks extremely suspicious into money that doesn't look suspicious at all.

Little tiny 'gotchas' aren't going to save you from a determined investigator. They are trying to follow a trail of evidence so they can produce more evidence. What you need is a clean break, so that the investigator hits a dead end and has no productive leads they can follow.

There will always be discrepancies due to e.g. latency of the network.

Just pretend you sent that transaction a millisecond before it was mined.

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