Author: Russell O'Connor 2018-02-12 15:52:30
Published on: 2018-02-12T15:52:30+00:00
The author proposes revisiting the replace-by-fee (RBF) policy defined in Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 125 (BIP 125) for when to replace transactions. The current policy can be problematic as sometimes a transaction becomes pinned, making it infeasible to fee bump with RBF. This occurs when one makes a normal payment to a large commercial service, and while the transaction remains unconfirmed, the commercial service creates a low-fee-rate sweep of one's payment among a collection of others. The problem is that while the fee rate of the sweep is low, the absolute size of the fee can still be large, making it infeasible to RBF the original transaction. The proposal is to change rules 3 and 4 in BIP 125 to address the new reality of rational miners' consideration. Rule 3' states that the replacement transaction must have a fee rate that is larger than the package fee rate of the root of the set of transactions it replaces, where the package fee rate is the fee rate implied by considering Child Pays For Parent (CPFP). Rule 4' is an amended anti-spam rule that is intended to avoid Denial-of-Service attacks from churning the mempool. The author acknowledges that other people on the mailing list have been thinking about RBF policy for far longer than they have, and their proposal may be naive. However, they believe it can start a conversation about addressing the problems with the current RBF policy.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T05:12:36.101604+00:00