Author: Stephen Morse 2015-06-19 13:33:05
Published on: 2015-06-19T13:33:05+00:00
F2Pool, the largest mining pool with 21% of the hashing power, has enabled full replace-by-fee (RBF) support after discussions with Peter Todd. This means that transactions that F2Pool has will be replaced if a conflicting transaction pays a higher fee. In the short term, this change will not affect the average user as most wallet software does not have the ability to detect conditions where an unconfirmed transaction may be double-spent by the sender. Users should continue to assume that unconfirmed transactions could be easily reversed by the sender until the first confirmation.However, in the long term, miner support of full RBF has several advantages for users, allowing them to make transactions more efficiently and pay lower fees. Full RBF also helps make use of the limited blockchain space more efficiently, with up to 90%+ transaction size savings possible in some transaction patterns. Full RBF also prevents a number of serious threats to the existing level playing field that miners operate in. Many services such as BlockCypher have attempted to predict the probability that unconfirmed transactions will be mined, often guaranteeing merchants payment even in the event of a double-spend. The next step after measuring propagation fails is to contract with miners directly, signing contracts with as much of the hashing power as possible to get the transactions they want mined and double-spends rejected. A research paper titled "Tampering with the Delivery of Blocks and Transactions in Bitcoin" highlights the vulnerability of Bitcoin network to block and transaction tampering. The paper was published on June 10th, 2015, and discusses the importance of improving security measures in place for Bitcoin transactions. The authors explain how the current design of Bitcoin allows malicious actors to delay or prevent the propagation of new blocks and transactions across the network, leading to double-spending attacks and other forms of fraud on the platform.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T23:42:11.042557+00:00