Author: Antoine Riard 2022-02-01 00:42:24
Published on: 2022-02-01T00:42:24+00:00
The Bitcoin Core RBF policy has been a topic of discussion, with Gloria Zhao initiating conversation about its limitations and potential for improvement. Bram Cohen questioned the need for disallowing RBF, stating that it is normal behavior and the feature is mostly there to appease some people's delusions that zeroconf is a thing. The latest state of the discussion can be found on gnusha.org and it appears that a gradual, multi-year deprecation may be preferred to ease adaptation of affected Bitcoin applications. Additionally, a more formalized Core policy deprecation process would be beneficial as high-impact tx-relay/mempool rules may need to change in the future. One issue discussed was incentive compatibility, ensuring that the RBF policy does not accept replacement transactions which would decrease fee profits of a miner. Incentive-incompatible policy may encourage transaction submission through routes other than the p2p network, harming censorship-resistance and privacy of Bitcoin payments. It was suggested that consolidated logic handling both regimes would be nice, as they result in different incentivized behavior. One regime involves more than a block's backlog in the mempool, in which case the transaction with the higher fee rate should win. In the other regime, where there isn't a whole block's worth of transactions, the one with higher total value should win. The issue seems to have to do with the slope of the supply/demand curve, which is gentle enough to keep the one transaction from hitting the rate in the first case but in the second is basically infinite.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T16:20:07.823988+00:00