Author: Tom Harding 2015-07-16 16:50:58
Published on: 2015-07-16T16:50:58+00:00
A discussion on bitcoin-dev mailing list regarding the evicting of a transaction and its dependents on its 2-hour anniversary, whether space is required or not, resulted in a suggestion to use blocks instead of time. The logic behind this was that users/wallets can know when they should rebroadcast and consider increasing the fee. However, there is a chance that fewer than 4 blocks have occurred using 120 minutes. On the other hand, using 12 blocks would give a 5% chance of having to wait for 3 hours. It was argued that the assumption that time is a better indicator is false because block mining times are not guaranteed in the future. If half the miners dropped, it could break the mempool. It was concluded that either method has consequences for user expectations and behavior. With fixed-block mempool expiration, the expiration time is variable and an alert can be unpredictable, whereas with fixed-timeout, the likelihood of expiration is more variable, but any expiration will occur at the timeout.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T02:42:07.354134+00:00