Author: Bram Cohen 2022-02-01 08:32:09
Published on: 2022-02-01T08:32:09+00:00
In a conversation between Eric Voskuil and Bram Cohen via the bitcoin-dev mailing list, they discussed the opt-in Replace-by-Fee (RBF) flag in transactions. Cohen questioned why it is still disallowed even though it is normal behavior, and suggested that the feature mostly exists to appease some people's delusions about zeroconf. Voskuil explained that there are two common regimes resulting in different incentivized behaviors: the first being when there is more than a block's backlog in the mempool, in which case the transaction with the higher fee rate should win, and the second being when there isn't a whole block's worth of transactions, in which case the transaction with higher total value should win. He also noted that the rational choice is the highest fee block-valid subgraph of the set of unconfirmed transactions in both cases. However, he acknowledged that it can be weird and has oddball edge cases about which transactions to route due to the oscillation back and forth depending on other things going on in the mempool.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T16:20:20.169494+00:00