Author: Antoine Riard 2022-12-02 01:52:46
Published on: 2022-12-02T01:52:46+00:00
In an email exchange on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Antoine Riard responds to Daniel Lipshitz, CEO of GAP600, a zero-confirmation risk analysis business, regarding full Replace-by-Fee (RBF) adoption. Riard explains that full RBF deployment by enough full-node operators and a subset of the mining hashrate would increase the cost of double-spend attacks by lambda users, thus increasing the risk exposure of GAP600's users. The increased risk exposure could lead GAP600 to alter the acceptance of incoming zero-conf transactions, as seen with Bitrefill earlier this year. Riard raises questions about GAP600's statistics, such as how many of the 1.5 million transactions per month are Bitcoin-only, how many are excluded from zeroconf due to factors like RBF, and what has been the average feerate. Riard expresses his personal position on fullrbf, stating that as a community, there is no conceptual consensus on deploying full RBF or removing it. He suggests that to remove the current option from Bitcoin Core, the prerequisite should be the qualification of enough economic flows at risk and the presence of a sizable loss in miners' income. Beyond that, he believes there is still the open question if the Bitcoin protocol development community should restrain user choice in policy settings in the name of preserving mining income and established use-case stability. Lipshitz, in his initial email, shares some statistics about GAP600's zero-conf use case, stating that as of November 2022, GAP600 has processed around 15 million transactions with a cumulative value of $2.3 billion USD. Lipshitz notes that GAP600 clients are primarily payment processors and non-custodial liquidity providers, and there are also merchants who have developed their own tools, so GAP600 statistics are only a subset of the full use case. Lipshitz argues that if full RBF becomes default enabled and significantly adopted, it would have a major impact on the capacity to accept zero confs on mainnet. The end result being this use case will be forced to move to a different chain, with lightning being just another option.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T01:03:08.896778+00:00