Min bid

[allboxes]

📝 Summary

Allow users to set a minimum bid to accept a block from a relay

⛱ Motivation and Context

#273

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✅ I have run these commands

• [✅ ] make lint
• [✅] make test-race
• [✅] go mod tidy

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Codecov Report

Attention: Patch coverage is 54.76190% with 19 lines in your changes missing coverage. Please review.

Project coverage is 66.66%. Comparing base (5c49007) to head (f10d25c).

Files with missing lines	Patch %	Lines
cli/main.go	45.71%	18 Missing and 1 partial ⚠️

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Additional details and impacted files

@@             Coverage Diff             @@
##             main     #274       +/-   ##
===========================================
- Coverage   82.12%   66.66%   -15.47%     
===========================================
  Files           5        7        +2     
  Lines         677      879      +202     
===========================================
+ Hits          556      586       +30     
- Misses         92      261      +169     
- Partials       29       32        +3     

Flag	Coverage Δ
unittests	66.66% <54.76%> (-15.47%)	⬇️

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[allboxes]

@metachris do you need anything else from me on this?

[metachris]

looks like a good feature to have. left a few comments, also please rebase 🙏

[allboxes]

Thanks for the comments, they should all be resolved in the above commit

[jumboshrimp100]

@allboxes, I think this PR is step in the right direction given that many people are wary of running mev-boost especially since the mev-boost reward has the possibility of being less than the reward you would have earned from a locally produced block. I have 2 comments (although this may be beyond the scope of the PR)

1. There are 2 types of min bid, absolute min bid and relative min bid. I take it this PR is an absolute mid bid, but it would also be useful to have the option to specify a relative min bid which would be the min bid above the reward you would receive from a locally produced block

2. Is there a way of transmitting this information to the relay? Under this implementation if I have a min bid of .1 eth will the relay realize this and only submit bids of .1 eth or more? Will the bid immediately be rejected, giving the relay the opportunity to submit a higher bid? Or will the low bid be silently ignored? The last case seems sub-optimal if the relay is willing to bid higher but did not know of the min required bid of the validator.

[jtraglia]

Hey @jumboshrimp100 I appreciate the questions!

1. There are 2 types of min bid, absolute min bid and relative min bid. I take it this PR is an absolute mid bid, but it would also be useful to have the option to specify a relative min bid which would be the min bid above the reward you would receive from a locally produced block

That's an interesting idea, but not in scope for mev-boost. Later, when the execution API adds the engine_getPayload endpoint (see this issue on GitHub), it will be possible for the validator client to compare the remote block's value to the local block's value. After this point, it's up the client to implement the feature (relative mid-bid) you mentioned.

2. Is there a way of transmitting this information to the relay? Under this implementation if I have a min bid of .1 eth will the relay realize this and only submit bids of .1 eth or more? Will the bid immediately be rejected, giving the relay the opportunity to submit a higher bid? Or will the low bid be silently ignored? The last case seems sub-optimal if the relay is willing to bid higher but did not know of the min required bid of the validator.

Personally, if I were to use this I'd like to keep my min-bid preference private. And this doesn't really align with how things work. A relay only has one opportunity to send a bid to mev-boost. If mev-boost rejects that bid, there is no higher bid that the relay can send, it's already sent it's highest value bid.

[jtraglia]

Overall, this looks pretty good. I like this feature. See my suggestions.

[jtraglia]

LGTM. Thanks for fixing those things.

[jtraglia]

Thanks, I didn't see that typo.

[jtraglia]

One more thing, the default minimum bid should be zero. It's up to the user (operator) to set this value based on their preferences. I'm just concerned with the side effects of this. For example, a default value of 0.001 would affect testnets (like sepolia) where the average mev reward is most likely to be below that threshold. I understand the desire for a non-zero default: low value blocks will be built using the local execution engine. But when CL clients start to compare the value to the block it built locally, I think that would serve as a better "default" minimum.

[allboxes]

Sure, that makes sense.

[jtraglia]

Looks great. Thanks!