Author: Anthony Towns 2022-10-16 08:08:49
Published on: 2022-10-16T08:08:49+00:00
In a recent bitcoin-dev discussion, the topic of whether to continue supporting and accepting unconfirmed "on-chain" payments indefinitely was debated. The rationale for deprecating this feature was discussed, including how it makes it easy to disrupt decentralised pooling protocols and how it's an unstable equilibrium. The choice between encouraging miners and relay nodes to support unconditional RBF immediately or drawing a line in the sand now but giving people time to update their software and business models was also debated. It was noted that some people are already running full RBF relay nodes, and there's a report that non-signalling RBF txs are now getting mined when they weren't a few months ago. If we're trying to socialise the idea that zeroconf deprecation is happening and that businesses now have a real deadline for migrating away from accepting unconfirmed txs if the risk of being defrauded concerns them, then enabling experimentation on test nets and not touching mainnet until a later release seems fairly fine. A proposal was suggested to activate full-RBF on testnet now and then commit in the code to a block height in the future at which full-RBF will activate on mainnet. This approach would resolve issues as it gives a clear deadline for businesses to adapt, provides plenty of time to update codes and test it, and when the deadline hits, the new behaviour can be relied upon. Additionally, nodes on signet and testnet will quickly adopt the new behaviour well before it's available on mainnet, making testing easier.
Updated on: 2023-05-22T21:32:43.855437+00:00