Antoine,
> In the direction of removing the current option from Bitcoin Core, I think
> the prerequisite to address are the qualification of enough economic flows
> at risk and the presence of a sizable loss in miners income.
Are such prerequisites for feature removal published somewhere? I don't see
any reason why removing a controversial change should be harder than adding
one. Generally, it is impossible to definitively attribute any change in
network condition to one thing in such a complex system, and also difficult
to know how much time is required to express negative effects. The whole
argument here is to prevent disruption of the status quo that has lasted
the whole history of Bitcoin, to avoid taking a speculative risk that
full-RBF, at the expense of zero-conf, is maybe better for miners... or
something.
Further, I feel the mempoolfullrbf feature was rushed through while this
controversy was growing, specifically to attempt to achieve this imaginary
protection of "sorry, that ship has sailed" which indicates an agenda that
is counter to greater social consensus and status quo. We should not
incentivize such behavior further by allowing this sort of feature
sainthood.
Beyond that, I think there is still the open question if we (we, as the
> Bitcoin protocol development community, with all its stakeholders) should
> restrain user choice in policy settings in the name of preserving mining
> income and established use-case stability.
Removing the mempoolfullrbf feature is the opposite of restraining user
choice.
First, any incentivized user can still create and distribute patches for
any given mempool policy, regardless of whether we remove the feature from
Core, but it is important to note that extremely few have felt the need to
do so in the past.
Second, the very debate here is about how it is mempoolfullrbf that removes
the user choice of zero-conf services. With a first-seen policy in place,
users have *more* options, and Bitcoin is thus more useful, and thus more
valuable to everyone. This is evident in that the feature of full-rbf is
that it overrides any ability for users to signal intent of how they wish
their transaction to be handled by nodes and miners. This is useful info to
miners, as they make more money by facilitating use cases than by
fee-minimizers painting everything as RBF. User-signaling is a useful
feature for the mempool, full-RBF removes that feature.
Third, when Bitcoin Core adds special support for specific policies, it
positions itself as a political authority and influencer. It is not Core's
place to support one subjective policy more than another, particularly when
it conflicts with years of status quo and breaks the current user space,
and likely resulting in more doublespent user experiences.
To recall, the original technical motivation of this option, and the wider
> smoother deployment was to address a DoS vector affecting another class of
> use-case: multi-party transactions like coinjoin and contracting protocols
> like Lightning [2] [3]. All of them expect to generate economic flows and
> corresponding mining income. Since then, alternative paths to solve this
> DoS vector have been devised, all with their own trade-offs and conceptual
> issues [4] [5].
I am particularly skeptical that users sending Bitcoin to themselves
(coinjoin) could ever be more incentive-compatible than fast-paced commerce
& priority competition. I am also skeptical that mempoolfullrbf actually
solves LN risks any better than opt-in RBF by default by LN implementations
and wallets.
Further, zero-conf support reduces friction for LN adoption by allowing us
to make instant, seamless UX within wallets when onboarding, rebalancing,
and splicing.
--
John Carvalho
CEO, Synonym.to
>
> Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2022 17:35:39 -0500
> From: Antoine Riard
> To: Bitcoin Protocol Discussion
>
> Subject: [bitcoin-dev] Fwd: [Opt-in full-RBF] Zero-conf apps in
> immediate danger
> Message-ID:
> <
> CALZpt+HFFwY4XECNZj3XLqnaumPeDjrwvnCsRa3vsGQfuXn8wA@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Hi Daniel,
>
> >From my understanding of GAP600, you're operating a zero-conf risk
> analysis
> business, which is integrated and leveraged by payment processors/liquidity
> providers and merchants. A deployment of fullrbf by enough full-node
> operators and a subset of the mining hashrate would lower the cost of
> double-spend attack by lamda users, therefore increasing the risk exposure
> of your users. This increased risk exposure could lead you to alter the
> acceptance of incoming zero-conf transactions, AFAICT in a similar
> reasoning as exposed by Bitrefill earlier this year [0].
>
> About the statistics you're asking for considerations, few further
> questions, on those 1.5M transactions per month, a) how many are
> Bitcoin-only (as I understand to be multi-cryptocurrencies), b) how many
> are excluded from zeroconf due to factors like RBF, long-chain of
> unconfirmed ancestors or too high-value and c) what has been the average
> feerate (assuming a standard size of 200 bytes) ?
>
> My personal position on fullrbf is still the same as expressed in #26525
> [1]. As a community, I think we still don't have conceptual consensus on
> deploying full-rbf, nor to remove it. In the direction of removing the
> current option from Bitcoin Core, I think the prerequisite to address are
> the qualification of enough economic flows at risk and the presence of a
> sizable loss in miners income. Beyond that, I think there is still the open
> question if we (we, as the Bitcoin protocol development community, with all
> its stakeholders) should restrain user choice in policy settings in the
> name of preserving mining income and established use-case stability.
>
> To recall, the original technical motivation of this option, and the wider
> smoother deployment was to address a DoS vector affecting another class of
> use-case: multi-party transactions like coinjoin and contracting protocols
> like Lightning [2] [3]. All of them expect to generate economic flows and
> corresponding mining income. Since then, alternative paths to solve this
> DoS vector have been devised, all with their own trade-offs and conceptual
> issues [4] [5].
>
> Best,
> Antoine
>