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Bitcoin's RBF impact on DASH adoption & InstantX

InTheWoods

Well-known member
Foundation Member
I would like to start a discussion about Peter Todd's RBF which was implemented into Bitcoin without a real debate or general consensus. Many merchants hate this so called feature for right reason as described below:

(3) RBF breaks zero-conf. Satoshi supported zero-conf. Were any actual merchants who have figured out pragmatic business approaches using zero-conf even consulted on this radical, controversial change?

My business accepts bitcoin and helps people with minor cash transfers and purchases. Fraud has NEVER been an issue as long as the transactions have been broadcast on the blockchain with appropriate fees. We usually send people their cash as soon as the transaction is broadcast.

Now we have to wait 10 minutes to avoid getting cheated out of hundreds of dollars, vastly increasing the service cost of accepting bitcoin. And we have to tell customers we promote bitcoin to that they are likely to be cheated if they don't wait 10 minutes while buying their bitcoin. It is such a spectacularly stupid thing to do, adding uncertainty and greater potential for fraud at every link of the transaction chain. Thanks a lot, Peter.

This was also mentioned in Mike Hearn's departure post:


Replace by fee

One problem with using fees to control congestion is that the fee to get to the front of the queue might change after you made a payment. Bitcoin Core has a brilliant solution to this problem — allow people to mark their payments as changeable after they’ve been sent, up until they appear in the block chain. The stated intention is to let people adjust the fee paid, but in fact their change also allows people to change the payment to point back to themselves, thus reversing it.

At a stroke, this makes using Bitcoin useless for actually buying things, as you’d have to wait for a buyer’s transaction to appear in the block chain … which from now on can take hours rather than minutes, due to the congestion.

Core’s reasoning for why this is OK goes like this: it’s no big loss because if you hadn’t been waiting for a block before, there was a theoretical risk of payment fraud, which means you weren’t using Bitcoin properly. Thus, making that risk a 100% certainty doesn’t really change anything.

In other words, they don’t recognise that risk management exists and so perceive this change as zero cost.

This protocol change will be released with the next version of Core (0.12), so will activate when the miners upgrade. It was massively condemned by the entire Bitcoin community but the remaining Bitcoin Core developers don’t care what other people think, so the change will happen.

If that didn’t convince you Bitcoin has serious problems, nothing will. How many people would think bitcoins are worth hundreds of dollars each when you soon won’t be able to use them in actual shops?
 
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Hearn's defection to help build GoldmanSachsCoin is despicable, but his criticisms of RBF are spot-on. Obviously DASH has already solved these problems in InstantX and maintained irreversibility of transactions, one of the foundational principles of Crypto. While my store is online and thus, doesn't have the concerns a B&M would have with RBF, I'd be hard-pressed to accept bitcoin in person when I sell products at flea markets, conventions, etc. if reversible transactions become a reality.

Unfortunately, though, I've sold products in bitcoin - never in DASH :(
 
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