Please share your recommendations for good overviews of the RBF debate, thanks!
83 sats \ 1 reply \ @andyleroy 3 Dec 2022
It's scary how good GPT is...
give a comprehensive summary of the bitcoin rbf proposal including the pros and cons
The bitcoin Replace-by-Fee (RBF) proposal is a way of allowing transactions on the bitcoin network to be flagged as replaceable, meaning that they can be replaced by a new transaction with a higher fee. This allows users to increase the fee on their transactions if they get stuck in the mempool (the pool of unconfirmed transactions) for too long.
The main advantage of the RBF proposal is that it allows users to have more control over the fees they pay on their transactions. By allowing transactions to be replaced with new ones that include higher fees, users can ensure that their transactions will be confirmed more quickly.
Another advantage is that it can help to prevent transaction congestion on the network. By allowing users to increase the fees on their transactions, the RBF proposal can incentivize users to include higher fees in their transactions, which can help to ensure that the most important transactions are confirmed first. This can help to prevent the network from becoming congested with low-fee transactions, which can slow down the confirmation of all transactions.
However, there are also some potential drawbacks to the RBF proposal. One of the main concerns is that it could be used for double-spending attacks, where a user tries to spend the same bitcoins twice. With RBF, a user could potentially create two transactions with the same bitcoins, and then replace the one with the lower fee with a new one that includes a higher fee, thus "tricking" the network into confirming the second transaction.
Another potential concern is that it could lead to increased centralization on the network. If only a small group of users are able to afford to include high fees on their transactions, this could lead to an uneven distribution of fees on the network, which could in turn lead to the concentration of power in the hands of a few large miners.
Overall, the bitcoin Replace-by-Fee proposal is a way of allowing users to have more control over the fees they pay on their transactions, which can help to prevent network congestion and ensure that important transactions are confirmed quickly. However, there are also some potential drawbacks to the proposal, such as the possibility of double-spending attacks and increased centralization on the network.
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @petertodd 4 Dec 2022
Good example of how GPT is just a statistical predictive model of text; it doesn't have genuine technical understanding.
RBF clearly reduces fees, because you don't have to overbid to avoid the risk of a transaction getting stuck. We were actually kinda lucky that miners agreed to run it. Fortunately, on an individual miner basis, it's clearly better for the individual miner.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @andyleroy 3 Dec 2022
And lastly, this post (linked here) has a nice summary: #101809
https://nydig.com/research/making-yield-out-of-nothing-at-all
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32 sats \ 9 replies \ @DarthCoin 3 Dec 2022
Here, the best simple explanation.
RBF was in Bitcoin for years, but people ignore it. Now suddenly everybody is trying to "explain" it, but I don't know why. Is just noise for nothing.
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1 sat \ 8 replies \ @clementinemoney OP 3 Dec 2022
As I understand it, the impetus for revived debate is that there was a recent change to Bitcoin Core having to do with RBF and some disagree with the change.
I’ve seen several “pieces” of both arguments but still struggling to find a good comprehensive overview of the entire disagreement.
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12 sats \ 7 replies \ @dtonon 3 Dec 2022
In short: before it was a matter of the sender to enable RBF for the single transaction, now there is a config (default set to false) that enable a node to treat all the transaction as RBF.
If the option will be largely activated this will kill the 0-conf practice, used by some business.
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33 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 3 Dec 2022
The short of a short: if a tx doesn't have at least 3 or 6 confirmations, is not your bitcoins.
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11 sats \ 0 replies \ @dtonon 3 Dec 2022
So 3, 6 or... 9?
Joking :)
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11 sats \ 1 reply \ @Tony 3 Dec 2022
any reads on those business models and why "forced RBF" breaks them?
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11 sats \ 0 replies \ @dtonon 3 Dec 2022
The risk of accepting 0-conf transactions increases at the point it is not acceptable anymore, so they cannot operate "real time".
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11 sats \ 2 replies \ @jp 3 Dec 2022
Is there any risk of spamming the mempool by continuously updating the transaction fee?
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11 sats \ 1 reply \ @Lumor 3 Dec 2022
Nodes should only be propagating txs increasing the fee, but yeah, the possibility of spamming the network through increasing the fee by 1 sat steps seems to be worse.. But users can already do it with RBF transactions. Only ancient pre-RBF nodes would not propagate the tx.
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35 sats \ 0 replies \ @petertodd 4 Dec 2022
Nodes do not propagate RBF replacements unless they pay a minimum threshold of additional funds per byte. The cost is high enough that it'd be a lot cheaper to just buy cloud servers and DoS attack the entire P2P network directly.
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20 sats \ 0 replies \ @petertodd 4 Dec 2022
Working on a blog post.
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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @andyleroy 3 Dec 2022
Great thread here: https://twitter.com/thomas_fahrer/status/1596281370133037057?s=20&t=QM5-qtLKJZ292sJ1HlHiOQ
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32 sats \ 0 replies \ @dtonon 4 Dec 2022
Interesting point
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