Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] A Replacement for RBF and CPFP: Non-Destructive TXID Dependencies for Fee Sponsoring

From: "David A. Harding" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2020 13:24:17 -0400

On Sat, Sep 19, 2020 at 09:30:56AM -0700, Jeremy wrote:
> Yup, I was aware of this limitation but I'm not sure how practical it is as
> an attack because it's quite expensive for the attacker. 

It's cheap if:

1. You were planning to consolidate all those UTXOs at roughly that
   feerate anyway.

2. After you no longer need your pinning transaction in the mempool, you
   make an out-of-band arrangement with a pool to mine a small
   conflicting transaction.

> But there are a few simple policies that can eliminate it:
> 
> 1) A Sponsoring TX never needs to be more than, say, 2 inputs and 2
> outputs. Restricting this via policy would help, or more flexibly
> limiting the total size of a sponsoring transaction to 1000 bytes.

I think that works (as policy).

> 2) Make A Sponsoring TX not need to pay more absolute fee, just needs to
> increase the feerate (perhaps with a constant relay fee bump to prevent
> spam).

I think it'd be hard to find a constant relay fee bump amount that was
high enough to prevent abuse but low enough not to unduly hinder
legitimate users.

> I think 1) is simpler and should allow full use of the sponsor mechanism
> while preventing this class of issue mostly.

Agreed.

Thanks,

-Dave