<oembed><type>rich</type><version>1.0</version><author_name>npub17rld56k4365lfphyd8u8kwuejey5xcazdxptserx03wc4jc9g24stx9l2h</author_name><author_url>https://nostr.ae/npub17rld56k4365lfphyd8u8kwuejey5xcazdxptserx03wc4jc9g24stx9l2h</author_url><provider_name>njump</provider_name><provider_url>https://nostr.ae</provider_url><html>📅 Original date posted:2022-11-02&#xA;📝 Original message:On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 12:25:46PM -0400, Greg Sanders via bitcoin-dev wrote:&#xA;&gt; For 0-conf services we have potential thieves who are willing&#xA;&gt; to *out-bid themselves* to have funds come back to themselves. It&#39;s not a&#xA;&gt; &#34;legitimate&#34; use-case, but a rational one.&#xA;&#xA;I think that&#39;s a huge oversimplification of &#34;rational&#34; -- otherwise&#xA;you might as well say that deliberately pinning txs is also rational,&#xA;because it allows the person doing the pinning to steal funds from their&#xA;counterparty by forcing a timeout to expire.&#xA;&#xA;There&#39;s no need for us as developers, or us as node operators, to support&#xA;every use case that some individual might find rational at some point in&#xA;time. After all, it might be individually rational for someone to want the&#xA;subsidy to stop decreasing, or to include 8MB of transactions per block.&#xA;&#xA;Note that it&#39;s also straightforwardly rational and incentive compatible&#xA;for miners to not want this patch to be available, under the following&#xA;scenario:&#xA;&#xA; - a significant number of on-chain txs are for zeroconf services&#xA; - fee income would be reduced if zeroconf services went away&#xA;   (both directly due to the absence of zeroconf payments, and by&#xA;   reducing mempool pressure, reducing fee income from the on-chain txs&#xA;   that remain)&#xA; - miners adopting fullrbf would cause zeroconf services to go away,&#xA;   (and won&#39;t enable a comparable volume of new services that generates&#xA;   comparable transaction volume)&#xA; - including the option in core would make other miners adopting&#xA;   fullrbf more likely&#xA;&#xA;I think the first three of those are fairly straightforward and objective,&#xA;at least at this point in time. The last is just a risk; but without&#xA;any counterbalancing benefit, why take it?&#xA;&#xA;Gaining a few thousand sats due to high feerate replacement txs from&#xA;people exploiting zeroconf services for a few months before all those&#xA;services shutdown doesn&#39;t make up for the lost fee income over the months&#xA;or years it might have otherwise taken people to naturally switch to&#xA;some better alternative.&#xA;&#xA;Even if fullrbf worked for preventing pinning that likely doesn&#39;t directly&#xA;result in much additional fee income: once you know that pinning doesn&#39;t&#xA;work, you just don&#39;t try it, which means there&#39;s no opportunity for&#xA;miners to profit from a bidding war from the pinners counterparties&#xA;repeatedly RBFing their preferred tx to get it mined.&#xA;&#xA;That also excludes second order risks: if you can&#39;t do zeroconf with BTC&#xA;anymore, do you switch to ERC20 tokens, and then trade your BTC savings&#xA;for ETH or USDT, and do enough people do that to lower the price of BTC?&#xA;If investors see BTC being less used for payments, does that lower their&#xA;confidence in bitcoin&#39;s future, and cause them to sell?&#xA;&#xA;&gt; Removing a&#xA;&gt; quite-likely-incentive-compatible option from the software just encourages&#xA;&gt; miners to adopt an additional patch&#xA;&#xA;Why shouldn&#39;t miners adopt an additional patch if they want some unusual&#xA;functionality?&#xA;&#xA;Don&#39;t we want/expect miners to have the ability to change the code in&#xA;meaningful ways, at a minimum to be able to cope with the scenario where&#xA;core somehow gets coopted and releases bad code, or to be able to deal&#xA;with the case where an emergency patch is needed?&#xA;&#xA;Is there any evidence miners even want this option? Peter suggested&#xA;that some non-signalling replacements were being mined already [0], but&#xA;as far as I can see [1] all of those are simply due to the transaction&#xA;they replaced not having propagated in the first place (or having been&#xA;evicted somehow? hard to tell without any data on the original tx).&#xA;&#xA;[0] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-October/021012.html&#xA;[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/26287#issuecomment-1292692367&#xA;&#xA;&gt; 2) Forcing miners to honor fees left on the table with respect to 0-conf,&#xA;&gt; or forcing them to run a custom patchset to go around it, is a step&#xA;&gt; backwards.&#xA;&#xA;As you already acknowledged, any miner that wants this behaviour can just&#xA;pick up the patch (or could run Knots, which already has the feature&#xA;enabled by default). It&#39;s simply false to say miners are being forced&#xA;to do anything, no matter what we do here. &#xA;&#xA;If the direction you&#39;re facing is one where you&#39;re moving towards making&#xA;life easier for people to commit fraud, and driving away businesses&#xA;that aren&#39;t doing anyone harm, without achieving anything much else;&#xA;then taking a step backwards seems like a sensible thing to do to me.&#xA;&#xA;(I remain optimistic about coming up with better RBF policy, and willing&#xA;to be gung ho about everyone switching over to it even if it does kill&#xA;off zeroconf, provided it actually does some good and we give people 6&#xA;months or more notice that it&#39;s definitely happening and what exactly&#xA;the new rules will be, though)&#xA;&#xA;Cheers,&#xA;aj</html></oembed>