Author: Greg Sanders 2022-10-21 14:01:01
Published on: 2022-10-21T14:01:01+00:00
The discussion in this thread revolves around the issue of full RBF (Replace-By-Fee) and its impact on Bitcoin transactions. Full RBF is not a consensus issue but it affects a large percentage of transactions made by wallets. This makes it a UX issue, rather than a safety issue for retail wallet users. It is noted that although retail wallets do not consider 0-conf as a valid deposit, they still put up some warning symbols to that effect. The speaker is looking for a concrete timeframe from 0-conf stakeholders, which should be agreed upon in the near future. This keeps the transition technically simple and removes uncertainty from decision-making going forward. There is also a discussion about breaking backwards compatibility and whether it's the right time to do so. One analogy used is the sunset of P2PKH addresses during the rollout of Segwit, which would have led to Segwit getting rolled out faster. The change to full RBF actually breaks more things than that and takes more effort to address than just implementing a new address format. Previously, Bitcoin Core has chosen to keep backwards compatibility and only roll out opt-in changes with broad consensus over them. At which point it's time to back away from that is not clear. Another point raised is that a large number of coins/users sit on custodial rails and this would essentially encumber protocol developers to those KYC/AML institutions. If Binance decides to never support Lightning in favor of BNC-wrapped BTC, should this be an issue at all for reasoning about a path forward? It is noted that the majority of wallets and services that people use with Bitcoin today are affected by this issue. There is also a suggestion to explore opt-in RBF further and see how "we" can come up with better answers to questions like "how can we make on-chain payments for goods priced in fiat work well for payees that opt-in to RBF?" This seems like the sort of thing that's better solved by a collaboration between wallet devs and merchant devs (and protocol devs), rather than just one or the other. It is suggested that building Bitcoin businesses on the lie that unconfirmed txs are safe and won't be replaced is going to bite us eventually; focusing on trying to push that back indefinitely is just going to make everyone less prepared when it eventually happens.Lastly, it is noted that Lightning is currently somewhere around 15% of all Bitcoin payments, and for some people, it would be an easier discussion to have when Lightning is at 80%+ of all Bitcoin transactions. However, it's hard to estimate when that might happen given current trends. It might be exponential growth, and the next 60% of Lightning growth may happen faster than the first 15%. But it's likely that we're talking about years here.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T00:57:32.602505+00:00