Quote from: Peter R on June 19, 2015, 12:42:53 PM

Quote from: Kupsi on June 19, 2015, 12:16:49 PM

Peter Todd again. I don't like this.

Quote

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.html

I'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.

Peter Todd's promotion of replace-by-fee scorched-earth is an attempt to keep the 1MB by the "back door", an attempt to realize the "Bitcoin as digital gold only for high-value transactions" dream. The effect of this change is to eliminate small purchases e.g. for cups of coffee, which require a workable zero-conf environment. Buying a car where the parties can wait for block confirmations would still be fine. He says that "zero-conf never worked" yet BitPay's business model repeatedly proves this false, every hour of every day.

I summarize my feelings here with:
Bitcoin as digital gold only for high-value transactions is a castle built upon quicksand. Bitcoin as digital gold for all transactions, where fiat is normally used, is a castle built upon solid rock.

Edit: this is interesting wrt tx vols:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3ag3jr/number_of_bitcoin_transactions_follows_cubic_trend/