I’d also encourage developers, Bitcoiners, and everyone to vote with their feet - if a rollup system introduces material MEVil risk to bitcoin, simply use an alternative system - if you don’t, the utility of that system is going to eventually be ruined by increased bitcoin miner centralization anyway. In this case, centralized and federated rollups are much more clearly safe, and decentralized or sovereign rollups should be carefully considered before using them!
-Another common example raised as MEV on bitcoin is the inclusion of nonstandard transactions or, more broadly, any transactions which reach a miner outside of the public mempool. While this indeed introduces strong centralization pressure for larger miners to offer this as a service, which is absolutely MEVil, we have not yet seen material demand or revenue from such transactions. Indeed, as mentioned above, miners have an incentive to ensure transactions received via private relay reach the public mempool where possible to allow for public RBF bidding. While there is certainly demand for nonstandard transaction inclusion as a novelty, it is unclear if this market will grow in the long term. Further, Bitcoin Core can, should, and generally does allow any transaction as standard, with restrictions only for transactions representing denial-of-service attacks or when the inclusion of a transaction makes Bitcoin Core unable to accurately calculate competitive back templates. As Bitcoin Core continues to improve, the demand for any nonstandard transactions will continue to decline, thus reducing the profit potential of any MEVil extraction.
+Another common example raised as MEV on bitcoin is the inclusion of nonstandard transactions or, more broadly, any transactions which reach a miner outside of the public mempool. While this indeed introduces strong centralization pressure for larger miners to offer this as a service, which is absolutely MEVil, we have not yet seen material demand or revenue from such transactions. Indeed, as mentioned above, miners have an incentive to ensure transactions received via private relay reach the public mempool where possible to allow for public RBF bidding. While there is certainly demand for nonstandard transaction inclusion as a novelty, it is unclear if this market will grow in the long term. Further, Bitcoin Core can, should, and generally does allow any transaction as standard, with restrictions only for transactions representing denial-of-service attacks or when the inclusion of a transaction makes Bitcoin Core unable to accurately calculate competitive block templates. As Bitcoin Core continues to improve, the demand for any nonstandard transactions will continue to decline, thus reducing the profit potential of any MEVil extraction.
More recently, out of band payments to miners have become popular again, allowing individuals to pay large pools for the inclusion of their transaction(s) using payments outside of the normal bitcoin transaction fee. This can create substantial MEVil but only if the out-of-band payment is offered directly to a single or group of miners. Any kind of out of band fee payment which is easily claimable by any miner does not contribute to MEVil-induced centralization, and thus open protocols for this are important. Further, while out of band fees have been commonly available on bitcoin before, they have never represented a substantial portion of miner revenue, and with technologies like Lightning and RBF (very slowly) becoming more popular in consumer bitcoin wallets, the need for out of band payments should further decrease.
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