BIP Full-RBF deployment schedule

bip-full-rbf-deadline.mediawiki

@@ -0,0 +1,97 @@
+<pre>
+  BIP: ??
+  Title: Full Replace-by-Fee Deployment Schedule
+  Author: Peter Todd <pete@petertodd.org>
+  Status: Draft
+  Type: Standards Track
+  Created: 2015-06-29
+</pre>
+
+==Summary==
+
+This BIP proposes a deployment schedule for full replace-by-fee (full-RBF)
+functionality, with an automatic activation of Tuesday April 5th, 2016, at 3pm
+UTC upon which supporting relay nodes and miners will enable full-RBF mempool
+behavior on mainnet. Prior to the activation deadline supporting nodes and
+miners will support first-seen-safe(1) replace-by-fee (FSS-RBF) mempool behavior.
+
+
+==Motivation==
+
+Full-RBF has significant efficiency advantages(2) over alternatives such as
+FSS-RBF and Child-Pays-For-Parent for a wide variety of common transaction
+patterns such as fee-bumping and multiple sequential payments, as well as smart
+contract protocols such as payment channels and auctions. Miner support would
+let the wider Bitcoin community use the blockchain more efficiently, supporting
+more transactions per second in less blockchain space.
+
+While full-RBF does allow users to "undo" transactions after they have been
+sent, the ability of decentralized wallets to protect users from double-spends
+has proven to be near-zero.(3) Centralized services have had some success in
+doing so, albeit at the cost of having to sybil attack the network, a strategy
+that cannot scale to more than a small handful of payment processing
+companies.(3)
+
+Even then success is not assured. Worryingly large payment providers have shown
+willingness(4) to consider extreme measures such as entering into legal
+contracts directly with large miners to ensure their transactions get mined.
+This is a significant centralization risk as it is not practical or even
+possible for small miners to enter into these contracts, leading to a situation
+where moving your hashing power to a larger pool will result in higher profits
+from hashing power contracts; if these payment providers secure a majority of
+hashing power with these contracts inevitably there will be a temptation to
+kick non-compliant miners off the network entirely with a 51% attack.
+
+It does not make sense for the whole Bitcoin community to incur higher
+transaction costs, sybil attacks, and centralization risk for the sake of a
+small handful of companies. However an orderly, planned, upgrade is still
+desirable.
+
+
+==Implementation==
+
+As full-RBF usage patterns, unlike first-seen-dependent zeroconf, does not
+depend on mempool syncronization this BIP won't specify detailed relay node
+behavior. However the following implementation is reasonable and well-tested
+with considerations such as DoS attacks taken into account:
+
+    https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6352
+
+To maximize engineer availability the deadline date was chosen to be towards,
+but not at, the start of the week, and away from any public holidays. 3pm UTC
+was chosen as a compromise between Pacific West Coast and European timezones;
+miners in the Asian timezones may choose to manually set their exact switchover
+date a few hours ahead with little risk to themselves. Nine months into the
+future was chosen on the basis of allowing time for affected companies to plan
+for the upgrade, without pushing the upgrade unnecessarily far into the future.
+
+
+==Credits==
+
+Thanks goes to Jeff Garzik for suggesting the idea of a full-RBF deployment
+deadline.
+
+
+==References==
+
+1) "First-Seen-Safe Replace-by-Fee",
+Peter Todd, Bitcoin-development mailing list, May 25th 2015,
+http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-May/008248.html
+
+2) "Cost savings by using replace-by-fee, 30-90%",
+Peter Todd, Bitcoin-development mailing list, May 25th 2015,
+http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-May/008232.html
+
+3) "F2Pool has enabled full replace-by-fee",
+Peter Todd, Bitcoin-development mailing list, June 19th 2015,
+http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-June/008843.html
+
+4) "F2Pool has enabled full replace-by-fee",
+Adrian Macneil, Director of Engineering, Coinbase,
+Bitcoin-development mailing list, June 19th 2015,
+http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-June/008868.html
+
+==Copyright==
+
+This document is placed in the public domain.
+