Quote from: shorena on January 17, 2016, 02:12:15 PM

Quote from: matthewh3 on January 17, 2016, 01:33:50 PM

Can anyone tell the major benefits of this update apart from what I understand is to help induce a free market for transaction fees. Won't it break the ability to accept zero confirmation transactions? As there are currently methods to do so with great certainty that a zero confirmation transaction will go through the next block. And also doesn't this break the core ethos of bitcoin being a pure push system only. I've read the RBF transactions update is being merged into bitcoin core at the next update. Isn't that a little hasty for such a drastic change to the protocol to be brought in so quickly. After it took us a good several months to agree on re-increasing the blocksize.

My limited understanding is that the first transaction needs to raise a flag in order to allow RBF. Merchants that accept 0-conf TX could scan for the flag and wait to deliver their part if it is set. On the other hand I am not sure how ready merchants or even regular wallet implementations are.

If this is correct then what is the disadvantage of RBF? The free market for transactions fees is created and merchants that want to keep allowing 0 conf transactions without risk can just exclude those who use the RBF flag.