Author: Peter Todd 2022-12-16 21:14:33
Published on: 2022-12-16T21:14:33+00:00
In a recent Bitcoin-dev mailing list, Daniel Lipshitz raised a query on the full-replace-by-fee (RBF) behavior used in multi-party transactions such as coinjoins and multi-party Lightning channels. Full-RBF is preferred because it avoids accidental double-spends, which can hold up progress in these protocols. A double-spend of an input to a multiparty transaction that isn't maximally trying to exploit transaction pinning can be hard to avoid in decentralized wallets. Additionally, for intentional DoS attacks, full-RBF makes those attacks much more expensive by forcing the attacker to use tx-pinning. During congested mempool conditions, an attacker could cause significant delays to multi-party transactions without full-RBF. Wallet of Satoshi claims to be performing 12,500 transactions/day, representing roughly 4% of the total payment volume of Bitcoin, whereas BlueWallet and SBW have 100K+ downloads on the Google Play store, so a reasonable guess is they're equally popular. This means they collectively represent 12% of the total number of transactions on Bitcoin. Wasabi has published data showing that currently about 750BTC/day are entering Wasabi 2.0 coinjoins. The author also claimed GAP600 handled about 10% of all transactions, indicating a very high degree of centralization, which is extremely undesirable for Bitcoin. Only a minority of transactions are merchant payment-type transactions where unconfirmed transactions would have any relevance at all. Finally, Lipshitz argued that there was a political tradeoff between a handful of centralized services that benefit from the first-seen status quo and the much larger group of users that use Lightning and coinjoins.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T03:26:12.328074+00:00