TLDR: What would be the chances of performing a successful Replace By Fee (double spend) before the block gets confirmed?
Scenario: I own a computer shop in Yangon, and I am looking into accepting Bitcoin payments at my shop. I am fairly new to crypto and I recently read about the Replace by fee (RBF) feature. My concern is: what if a customer comes and buys a MacBook or any product, completes the purchase with Bitcoin, then leaves the store and re-broadcasts a transaction with slightly higher fee back to themselves within the next 10 minutes.
How likely are RBF successful? Is there any way I can prevent this?
Thank you!
Assuming that you don't immediately exchange the product and you wait for the actual transaction to go through and be completely confirmed, you won't have to worry about replace-by-fee fraud. Considering that it only takes 10 minutes to confirm the transaction, I'm sure the customer could wait that long in a worst-case scenario. The only real way to prevent RBF scams is to wait for the original transaction to be confirmed, but the chances of it occurring are actually quite low. I wouldn't be significantly concerned about it.