S14 E4: Peter Todd vs Sergej Korliar on Full RBF

Full RBF is one of the most controversial topics in Bitcoin. On one side, RBF creator Peter Todd lobbies for the feature to become a standard. On the other side, Bitrefill CEO Sergej Kotliar thinks RBF is bad for business. This is the RBF debate. ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Peter Todd is the creator of RBF and the biggest advocate for making every transaction enable the feature by default. He wrote this article to explain his point of view: https://petertodd.org/2023/why-you-should-run-mempoolfullrbf Sergej Korliar is the CEO of Bitrefill and an advocate for 0-confirmation transactions, as long as the receiver is willing to take the risk. He considers that full RBF effectively destroys the 0-confirmation use case, potentially slows down Bitcoin adoption and makes users migrate towards altcoins for commerce. This episode is a debate between the two perspectives. It also marks the first time in a while when the two of them sat down to talk and this fact is reflected on how tense the interaction became towards the end. Both participants agreed to record a second part of this debate, after gathering more information to either back up their claims or debunk their adversary's statements with data. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––– The Full RBF Debate [00:01:59] Peter Todd and Sergej Kotliar present their opposing views on RBF. Understanding Full RBF [00:03:00] Sergej explains the concept of full RBF and its impact on transaction replaceability and user experience. Reliability and Usefulness of RBF [00:06:26] Peter Todd counters Sergej's arguments, discussing the reliability and usefulness of full RBF in real-world scenarios. Full RBF and multiparty transactions [00:11:27] Discussion on the trade-offs of full RBF for multiparty transactions and the impact on transactions like Wasabi's CoinJoins. Benefits and inconveniences of on-chain payments [00:14:15] Debate on the trade-offs of using zero conf and the advantages and disadvantages of on-chain payments. The use of RBF for power users [00:19:35] Discussion on the usefulness of RBF for power users, programmatic transactions, and multi-party scenarios. [00:21:16] Discussion on the frequency of using RBF (Replace-By-Fee) in transactions and assumptions about exchange users. [00:23:06] The unpredictability of the bitcoin mempool and blocks, in relation to the need to bump fees. [00:26:37] Debate on the usage of zero-conf (zero confirmation) transactions and examples of merchants accepting them. [00:30:00] Discussion on the percentage of blockchain space used by low fees and the impact on usage. [00:30:59] Importance of rough consensus and the difficulty of making changes in the Bitcoin network. [00:38:48] Discussion about the reliability of zero-conf transactions and the real-world data supporting its usage. [00:39:13] Debate on the risk involved in accepting zero-conf transactions and the potential vulnerabilities. [00:45:14] Plans for a potential continuation of the discussion on the topic of zero-conf transactions in a future episode.