Published on: 2022-12-05T12:21:44+00:00
GAP600, a company specializing in processing cryptocurrency transactions, has processed approximately 15 million transactions with a total value of $2.3 billion USD from January to November 2022. The majority of their clients are payment processors and liquidity providers. However, the CEO of GAP600, Daniel Lipshitz, expressed concern over the potential adoption of full Replace-by-Fee (RBF) as default, as it would make zero-conf acceptance difficult. This could significantly impact GAP600's market share, as they currently process around 1.5 million transactions per month.GAP600 guarantees zero confirmed Bitcoin and other crypto transactions, allowing their customers to recognize zero-conf deposits. They reimburse clients if a transaction they confirmed gets double-spent. However, if full RBF were to become dominant, zero-conf acceptance would be affected. It is unclear how many of GAP600's processed transactions relied on their unconfirmed transaction tools.The email exchange also discussed the services provided by GAP600 to Shapeshift, one of their former clients. Shapeshift no longer uses GAP600's services but occasionally asks for fee recommendations. The conversation highlights the significance of zero-conf transactions in the cryptocurrency industry and raises questions about the implementation and reliance on unconfirmed transaction tools.The discussion on the bitcoin-dev mailing list explores the issue of full RBF and its impact on Bitcoin transactions. There are concerns about the degradation of user experience for 0-conf deposits and the risk of exchange rate changes between fiat and BTC. Various solutions, such as using Child-Pays-for-Parent (CPFP) to lock in FX risk or making the double-spender over-pay, are proposed but have limitations.The conversation emphasizes the need for collaboration between wallet developers, merchant developers, and protocol developers to address these issues and improve the Bitcoin payment experience. Specific implementations of RBF features in various wallets are also discussed, highlighting the need for collaboration to enhance the RBF experience.The risks associated with accepting Bitcoin payments are highlighted, including the zeroconf risk and the FX risk. The conversation mentions the "American call option," where users can make low-fee transactions and wait to see if the BTCUSD rate changes before canceling and making a cheaper transaction. This could potentially abuse the system and harm merchants.Sergej Kotliar, CEO of Bitrefill, raises concerns about the default use of RBF in Bitcoin transactions. He suggests a risk-based approach to determine which payments are non-trivial to reverse, considering user experience. There is also discussion about Lightning Network adoption and the challenges of RBF as a default policy.The bitcoin-dev mailing list recently discussed the relay of full-RBF (replace-by-fee) transactions. One member stated that it is already working well, except for a few percent of hashrate that doesn't accept fullrbf replacement transactions. However, another member disagreed, emphasizing the importance of all full node users trying fullrbf. The first member explained that the relay of full-rbf transactions currently works well due to preferential rbf peering implementations. They personally run four nodes with this feature enabled and haven't seen many non-opt-in doublespends get mined. However, they have observed a few through their Alice OTS calendar, which could increase as miners adopt full-rbf.There are concerns about the gaslighting happening with the advancement of RBF, while merchants wanting to manage their own 0conf risk better is not deemed acceptable. Some argue that miners can facilitate doublespends anyway if the fees are higher. However, proponents of RBF seem to threaten the use case of on-chain Bitcoin being useful at the point-of-sale for merchants and consumers. This may lead to the creation of alternative fee mechanisms and trusted/exclusive mempools where first-seen transactions are respected.According to a tweet by Sergej Kotliar in January 2022, lightning payments account for only 4% compared to on-chain payments, which make up 32%. Bitrefill and similar providers could promote the use of lightning payments by displaying them by default and presenting on-chain payments as a fallback. It would be interesting to know if these services face any obstacles or if they disagree that lightning is an improvement over accepting unconfirmed on-chain transactions from untrusted parties.Pieter Wuille via bitcoin-dev proposed a step towards getting full RBF on the network by allowing experimentation and socializing the notion that developers believe it is time. However, there seems to be confusion about what exactly they believe it is time for. There are two possibilities: (a) deprecating the acceptance of zeroconf transactions on mainnet over the next 6, 12, or 18 months, or (b) switching mainnet mining and relay nodes to full RBF.Pieter Wuille commented on the opt-in flag for full-RBF, stating that adding the flag is a likely step towards wider adoption on the network.
Updated on: 2023-08-02T07:48:23.736188+00:00