F2Pool has enabled full replace-by-fee

Summary:

On June 19th, 2015, F2Pool, the largest mining pool, enabled full replace-by-fee (RBF), which allowed for Finney attacks and double-spends. However, this code change also indicated progress towards a safer replace-by-fee model. In the short term, current wallet software cannot detect conditions where an unconfirmed transaction may be double-spent by the sender. SPV wallets based on bitcoinj also cannot reliably detect invalid transactions. The long-term miner support of full RBF has several advantages to users, allowing them to make transactions more efficiently with lower fees. However, as no wallet supporting these features existed yet, this means very little for average users.Miner support of full RBF is an important step towards a fully functioning transaction fee market that doesn't lead to users' transactions getting mysteriously "stuck", particularly during network flooding events/attacks. Full RBF helps make use of the limited blockchain space more efficiently, with up to 90%+ transaction size savings possible in some transaction patterns. 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. However, there are several serious problems with this approach. To actually use full RBF, users need to get the full-RBF patch to v0.10.2 and try out replace-by-fee-tools. Double-spends on the network can be watched at http://respends.thinlink.com/. In 2015, Peter Todd shared a link to a report titled “Tampering with the Delivery of Blocks and Transactions in Bitcoin” by Arthur Gervais, Hubert Ritzdorf, Ghassan O. Karame, and Srdjan Capkun on the Bitcoin-development mailing list. The report was published on Cryptology ePrint Archive on June 10th, 2015. Meanwhile, Jeff Garzik, a Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist, signed off on the mail. No further information is provided in the given context.

Updated on: 2023-06-09T23:47:15.473924+00:00