Peter Todd again. I don't like this.
Yesterday F2Pool, currently the largest pool with 21% of the hashing power, enabled full replace-by-fee (RBF) support after discussions with me. This means that transactions that F2Pool has will be replaced if a conflicting transaction pays a higher fee. There are no requirements for the replacement transaction to pay addresses that were paid by the previous transaction.
http://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg08422.htmlI've never understood Peter Todd's rationale for promoting replace-by-fee.
The way Bitcoin was designed, if a node sees a second transaction that spends an output already spent by a previous transaction, it ignores the second transaction. The result is that the second (and in most cases, fraudulent) transaction propagates to very few nodes and has little chance of being mined into a block. If the entire network applies this policy homogeneously, double-spending zero-confirm transactions is very difficult, especially if merchants just wait a few second to monitor the propagation of the TX with a well-connected listening node.
What Peter Todd's "replace-by-fee" support does, is allows
any unconfirmed transaction to be removed from a node's mempool if a conflicting transaction,
received after the original transaction, pays a higher fee. If all nodes in the network adopted this policy, it would make zero-confirm transactions trivially-easy to double spend.
Is there some benefit to RBF that I'm missing? This seems like a reckless policy.
I deleted my last post in this thread because after some reflection I thought there was a chance I was being unfair to Peter Todd and the post was unhelpfully inflammitory.
Then, not ten minutes later, he and his supporters confirm exactly what I said on the mailing list.
They want to intentionally break native Bitcoin transactions to punish anyone who doesn't adopt Proofchains.
Users are not to be allowed to make their own risk assessments and adopt Proofchains if and only if they think it's the best solution for their particular problem based on their own judgement - they need to be forced into a better solution because Peter Todd knows best for them.