Author: Peter Todd 2023-01-09 22:18:52
Published on: 2023-01-09T22:18:52+00:00
The removal of full-RBF (replace-by-fee) from Bitcoin was largely due to concerns about tx-pinning. However, the absence of full-RBF can lead to intentional and unintentional double-spending attacks on multi-party protocols by holding up progress until a low-fee transaction gets mined. This is particularly problematic for transactions containing multiple inputs exclusively controlled by different parties, such as in a Wasabi coinjoin or multi-party-funded Lightning channels. Full-RBF mitigates the double-spend DoS attack by ensuring that a higher fee transaction gets mined in a reasonable amount of time so the protocol makes forward progress. Although tx-pinning increases the cost of attacks, it is still very expensive to exploit and full-RBF remains a valuable improvement for multi-party protocols. Multi-party protocols always have the property that attackers can spend money to DoS attack by creating more UTXOs/identities/etc, so this isn't any worse than the status quo. In conclusion, full-RBF clearly improves Bitcoin for multi-party protocols, among the many other reasons to adopt it.
Updated on: 2023-05-22T23:22:12.214485+00:00