Author: Sergej Kotliar 2022-10-20 14:17:23
Published on: 2022-10-20T14:17:23+00:00
The biggest risk associated with accepting Bitcoin payments is FX risk, which involves committing to a certain BTCUSD rate before a purchase. Over time, some transactions lose money to FX while others earn money, which evens out in the end. However, the easily accessible “cancel transaction” features can be systematically abused, making it more dangerous than the rare risk of losing 100% of one occasional payment.Opt-in RBF is already capable of executing this form of abuse. To fool non-RBF zeroconf, one needs access to mining infrastructure, and the probability of success is the percentage of hash rate controlled. Lightning currently accounts for around 15% of total Bitcoin payments. The bitcoin-dev mailing list has been discussing whether Lightning adoption should come at the expense of on-chain commerce. The discussion was prompted by data showing that 15% of transactions are made using Lightning and 20% use on-chain but signal RBF and are excluded from zeroconf. However, 60% of transactions are on-chain and seem fine for zeroconf. The discussion centers around whether it is necessary to limit on-chain commerce to make Lightning more appealing or if making Lightning work better is a challenge in its own right. While the benefits of Lightning are obvious, the suggestion that on-chain transactions should be limited has led some to suggest that the conversation would be easier when Lightning accounts for 80%+ of all bitcoin transactions.The efficacy of RBF as a solution to unsticking transactions is also discussed. While it is acknowledged that it can be useful for power users, roughly 80% of users do not have access to the functionality. Furthermore, explaining how to use RBF to non-power users is complex and adding CPFP on the wallet side may lead to confusion.If merchants and users are unable to add fees to transactions to get them to confirm, then they will either expire or be dropped from mempools. In the expiry case, the merchant can rebroadcast the transaction to keep it alive, but in the full mempool case, this is only possible if the merchant is also CPFPing it.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T00:55:32.707561+00:00