Marcin Pawlowski a93311013b

reports/blend/pd: section 3.10, cover traffic ...

Written from configs/cover-traffic.yaml: the rate swept over three decades against
three release delays, each timeline paired with the epoch emission budget.

The finding that shapes the section is that mixing never happens. At one message
per second a relay holds 0.0014 messages and never more than two; even 256x the
rate reaches only 0.39, matching Little law exactly. So the anonymity set is
entirely blending -- the broadcasts a relay saw between releases -- which follows
rate*(2M+1)/3, twice the mean hold. Measured within ~1% over most of the range.

That makes delay the cheap lever: both knobs enter linearly, but bandwidth is paid
on every link while delay is paid once per hop. An anonymity set of 100 costs 42.9
msg/s at a 3s delay and 4.9 msg/s at 30s.

The quota ceiling is the hard edge. A node proposals must fit its emission budget,
capping stake at ln(1-q)/ln(1-f) of INFERRED stake -- about 0.1% at the baseline
rate once Poisson fluctuation is allowed for. A 9.5% holder overruns by ~65x and
is distinguishable by emission count alone, before any path is captured.

Two existing sections needed correcting as a result. 3.6-3.7: with cover traffic
running, catching an emission is not catching a block, and the large stakers those
sections analyse sit one to two orders of magnitude above the quota ceiling, so
their binding exposure is the quota rather than the cascade. 5: the timing-
correlation adversary was deferred for want of cover traffic and is now unblocked.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-08-06 17:59:59 +02:00

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pd

reports/blend/pd: section 3.10, cover traffic

2026-08-06 17:59:59 +02:00