Author: Anthony Towns 2022-10-20 19:58:41
Published on: 2022-10-20T19:58:41+00:00
The discussion in this context revolves around the challenges of opt-in RBF, which some people find a pain point. The risk factor of fiat/BTC exchange rate changes between now and when the transaction actually confirms is worrying even if it hasn't caused real problems yet. Lightning works great but is still pretty small, while zeroconf works great for transactions that opt-out of RBF. The idea of coming up with better answers to make on-chain payments for goods priced in fiat work well for payees that opt-in to RBF is suggested. This could be solved by a collaboration between wallet devs and merchant devs (and protocol devs?). Further discussion is regarding the practice of creating two conflicting transactions in advance, one paying the merchant, one paying yourself, connect to many peers, relay the one paying the merchant to the merchant, and the other to everyone else. It was observed that this practice isn't easy to exploit as the attacker has to identify the merchant's node so that they get the bad tx, and you have to connect to many peers so that your preferred tx propagates to miners first. Currently, Lightning is somewhere around 15% of total bitcoin payments. It is observed that the sub-par experience of about 25% of payments compared to what is expected is not surprising, given that Bitcoin aims to reinvent both money and payments. Going full RBF would bump that from 25% to 85%, which would be pretty terrible. The discussion ends with an estimated timeline of exponential growth for lightning. The next 60% of Lightning growth might happen faster than the first 15%. Hard to tell. But we're likely talking years here. People are going with their gut feeling since there are no actual numbers to watch the progress, so it might be a lot easier to be patient about waiting for lightning adoption to hit 80% or whatever, and focus on productive things in the meantime.
Updated on: 2023-05-22T21:34:50.852689+00:00