Author: Sergej Kotliar 2022-10-20 12:37:53
Published on: 2022-10-20T12:37:53+00:00
In a recent conversation on bitcoin-dev, Sergej Kotliar discussed the risks associated with accepting bitcoin payments. While zeroconf risk can be easily managed, FX risk poses a bigger issue for merchants as they must commit to a certain BTCUSD rate ahead of time. Additionally, he pointed out the potential for abuse if there is an easily accessible 'cancel transaction' feature in wallets, which could lead to systematic exploitation of businesses. RBF transactions are also deemed unsafe even when waiting for confirmation and should be rejected.Currently, Lightning accounts for 15% of total bitcoin payments. Still, there is a discussion on whether Lightning adoption should go to 100% by disabling on-chain commerce. However, the benefits of Lightning are acknowledged, and efforts to make it work better are underway.Sergej Kotliar, CEO of Bitrefill, also discussed the complexities of fee bumping options like Replace-By-Fee (RBF) and Child-Pays-For-Parent (CPFP). According to Kotliar, RBF is difficult to understand for non-power users, making it challenging to explain how to use it. As a result, mostly power users have access to RBF and know how to handle it. However, rolling out RBF to the broader market could cause more confusion.CPFP is somewhat more viable than RBF but still not perfect as it would require lots of edge case code to handle abuse vectors. Kotliar believes that if merchants and users cannot add fees to a transaction to get it to confirm, then they are vulnerable to either expiry or being dropped from mempools. In the expiry case, the merchant can rebroadcast the original transaction to keep it alive, perhaps with a good chance of beating an attacker to the punch. But in the full mempool case, it's only possible to do that if you were also CPFPing it, which he had earlier ruled out.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T00:49:04.240741+00:00