F2Pool has enabled full replace-by-fee

Summary:

F2Pool, a major player in Bitcoin's network 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. Although the impact on users is likely to be minimal in the short term, miner support of full RBF has many advantages in the long term. It leads to more efficient transactions and lower fees for users but requires wallets supporting these features, none of which exist yet.For decentralized wallets, accepting unconfirmed transactions from untrusted people is a difficult problem to solve. These wallets only have a handful of connections to the network, with no way of knowing if those connections give an accurate view of what transactions miners actually know about. The only serious attempt to fix this problem for decentralized wallets that has been actually deployed is Andresen/Harding's double-spend relaying, implemented in Bitcoin XT. Many services such as BlockCypher have attempted to predict the probability that unconfirmed transactions will be mined. Additionally, 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. However, there are several serious problems with this approach. Firstly, mining contracts can be used to double-spend even when they're being used "honestly". Secondly, they still don't work without 51% attacking other miners. Thirdly, legal contracts give the advantage to non-anonymous miners in Western jurisdictions.In May and June of 2015, the Bitcoin-development mailing list saw a couple of interesting discussions. The first was about cost savings through the use of replace-by-fee, which could lead to savings of 30-90%. This was discussed by Peter Todd, who provided a link to his thoughts on the matter. The second discussion was about potential tampering with the delivery of blocks and transactions in Bitcoin. The report, titled "Tampering with the Delivery of Blocks and Transactions in Bitcoin," was written by Arthur Gervais, Hubert Ritzdorf, Ghassan O. Karame, and Srdjan Capkun and is available on the Cryptology ePrint Archive.

Updated on: 2023-06-09T23:42:59.215917+00:00