What prevents RBF from being used for fraudulent payment reversals?

Pay 1BTC to Alice for hard goods, then after you receive the goods
broadcast a double spend of that transaction to pay Alice nothing? Your
only cost is the higher network fee of the 2nd tx.

Thanks,
-Danny

On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 5:10 PM, Peter Todd <pete@petertodd.org> wrote:

> On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 12:03:09AM +0200, Mike Hearn wrote:
> > CPFP also solves it just fine.
>
> CPFP is a significantly more expensive way of paying fees than RBF,
> particularly for the use-case of defragmenting outputs, with cost
> savings ranging from 30% to 90%
>
>
> Case 1: CPFP vs. RBF for increasing the fee on a single tx
> ----------------------------------------------------------
>
> Creating an spending a P2PKH output uses 34 bytes of txout, and 148
> bytes of txin, 182 bytes total.
>
> Let's suppose I have a 1 BTC P2PKH output and I want to pay 0.1 BTC to
> Alice. This results in a 1in/2out transaction t1 that's 226 bytes in size.
> I forget to click on the "priority fee" option, so it goes out with the
> minimum fee of 2.26uBTC. Whoops! I use CPFP to spend that output,
> creating a new transaction t2 that's 192 bytes in size. I want to pay
> 1mBTC/KB for a fast confirmation, so I'm now paying 418uBTC of
> transaction fees.
>
> On the other hand, had I use RBF, my wallet would have simply
> rebroadcast t1 with the change address decreased. The rules require you
> to pay 2.26uBTC for the bandwidth consumed broadcasting it, plus the new
> fee level, or 218uBTC of fees in total.
>
> Cost savings: 48%
>
>
> Case 2: Paying multiple recipients in succession
> ------------------------------------------------
>
> Suppose that after I pay Alice, I also decide to pay Bob for his hard
> work demonstrating cryptographic protocols. I need to create a new
> transaction t2 spending t1's change address. Normally t2 would be
> another 226 bytes in size, resulting in 226uBTC additional fees.
>
> With RBF on the other hand I can simply double-spend t1 with a
> transaction paying both Alice and Bob. This new transaction is 260 bytes
> in size. I have to pay 2.6uBTC additional fees to pay for the bandwidth
> consumed broadcasting it, resulting in an additional 36uBTC of fees.
>
> Cost savings: 84%
>
>
> Case 3: Paying multiple recipients from a 2-of-3 multisig wallet
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The above situation gets even worse with multisig. t1 in the multisig
> case is 367 bytes; t2 another 367 bytes, costing an additional 367uBTC
> in fees. With RBF we rewrite t1 with an additional output, resulting in
> a 399 byte transaction, with just 36uBTC in additional fees.
>
> Cost savings: 90%
>
>
> Case 4: Dust defragmentation
> ----------------------------
>
> My wallet has a two transaction outputs that it wants to combine into
> one for the purpose of UTXO defragmentation. It broadcasts transaction
> t1 with two inputs and one output, size 340 bytes, paying zero fees.
>
> Prior to the transaction confirming I find I need to spend those funds
> for a priority transaction at the 1mBTC/KB fee level. This transaction,
> t2a, has one input and two outputs, 226 bytes in size. However it needs
> to pay fees for both transactions at once, resulting in a combined total
> fee of 556uBTC. If this situation happens frequently, defragmenting
> UTXOs is likely to cost more in additional fees than it saves.
>
> With RBF I'd simply doublespend t1 with a 2-in-2-out transaction 374
> bytes in size, paying 374uBTC. Even better, if one of the two inputs is
> sufficiently large to cover my costs I can doublespend t1 with a
> 1-in-2-out tx just 226 bytes in size, paying 226uBTC.
>
> Cost savings: 32% to 59%, or even infinite if defragmentation w/o RBF
>               costs you more than you save
>
> --
> 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
> 0000000000000000134ce6577d4122094479f548b997baf84367eaf0c190bc9f
>
>
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