This proposal revisits the potential benefits of enabling weak blocks through the infrastructure built for compact blocks, aiming to enhance the efficiency of compact block relay by reducing unnecessary round trips and delays in final block propagation. Such improvements could contribute positively to mining fairness and decentralization by addressing variances in mempool policies and the associated churn.

The idea is to adapt the messaging format used by compact blocks to support the transmission of "weak compact blocks." This approach does not require the formation of a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) or consensus beyond their validation, positioning these messages as a resilient layer for broadcasting miners' ongoing efforts. The proposed system tolerates slower speeds or failures as long as the proof of work is meticulously validated. However, several open questions remain concerning the level of validation necessary for sharing transactions within weak blocks, strategies to allow weak blocks to be "forgotten" without storage, and the response mechanisms for unlocatable transactions.

A Proof of Concept (PoC) demonstrating the feasibility of this idea has been developed, highlighting the process from receiving weak blocks to integrating their transactions into the mempool and further relaying these blocks. This PoC, although preliminary, underscores the need for further discussion on parameters such as the PoW multiplier, the number of blocks to buffer, and handling transactions already present in the mempool. Additionally, the adaptation might consider both low and high bandwidth pathways for propagating weak blocks, balancing efficiency with bandwidth constraints.

Further exploration of this proposal's utility includes potential applications like next-block fee estimation, suggesting broader implications for network performance and miner strategy. The next steps involve soliciting feedback from the developer community and assessing miner interest and practical use cases, including whether miners would utilize RPCs for block submission or if a protocol should accommodate direct submissions of non-compact versions for initial dissemination. This requires market research to understand the feasibility and willingness among miners, especially smaller operators, to adopt such a system for improved network convergence.