Author: Sergej Kotliar 2022-10-20 14:11:48
Published on: 2022-10-20T14:11:48+00:00
In a thread on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Sergej Kotliar, CEO of Bitrefill, chimed in to express his concerns over the potential dangers of RBF as a default policy. He highlighted a risk called the American call option, which could endanger the entirety of the BIP21 model, and discussed the bigger danger posed by FX risk rather than zero-conf risk. He also noted that Bitrefill currently processes 1500-2000 on-chain payments every day and expressed concern that a world where bitcoin becomes de facto RBF by default would lead to them turning off the BIP21 model for on-chain payments. Kotliar suggested that a serious discussion on whether we want Lightning adoption to go to 100% by means of disabling on-chain commerce needs to be had, and cautioned against introducing more clunkiness vectors as they are centralizing factors. Kotliar also discussed the efficacy of RBF to "unstuck" stuck transactions, pointing out that most users don't have access to that functionality, and explaining how RBF is too complex for non-power-users. Finally, he proposed a risk-based approach to decide on which payments are non-trivial to reverse, taking into account user experience, and reminded readers that in the fiat world card payments have up to 5% chargebacks, whereas in zero-conf bitcoin land we deal with fewer than 1 in a million accepted transactions successfully reversed.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T00:49:18.063226+00:00