Why Mempools Are Important For Censorship Resistance

While attending the MIT Bitcoin Expo in Boston over the weekend I was lucky enough to get a chance to sit down and talk with Bitcoin Core contributor and maintainer Gloria Zhao. 

Gloria began contributing to Bitcoin Core in 2020 shortly before she graduated from UC Berkeley at the end of the year. Giving up a chance to work full time at Google after a college internship, she decided to jump into contributing to Bitcoin Core full time thanks to funding from Brink with contributions from the Human Rights Foundation and Spiral. 

In 2022 she became a Bitcoin Core maintainer, one of the developers with commit permissions allowing them to finalize adding new code in the Bitcoin Core repository. She took on that role the same day that Pieter Wiulle stepped down. 

In addition to her role as a contributor and maintainer, Gloria helps mentor newer Bitcoin Core contributors as well as organizes the Bitcoin Core PR Review Club with Stéphan Vuylsteke to do weekly reviews of open pull requests proposing new code to Bitcoin Core. The club can be found here for those who want to participate (nudge, nudge). 

She talked with me about the focus of her work on Bitcoin Core, the mempool. We discussed why a decentralized and open mempool is important for Bitcoin’s censorship resistance, some of her work on package relay (sending transactions across the network as groups to enable better fee optimization and reliability), how the mempool interacts with layer two systems, and what is being planned for future improvements to ensure the mempool stays healthy and functional. 

You can watch the interview here: