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Online Bitcoin discourse has been ripe with yet another controversial technical topic: Replace by fee (RBF).
RBF is a node policy that allows an unconfirmed transaction to be replaced with a different transaction that spends at least one of the same inputs and which pays a higher transaction fee. RBF is typically used in the wild to speed up a pending transaction by bumping
the fee to miners.
Although RBF has existed as a concept since Satoshi, RBF remains a divisive issue today for a number of reasons, particularly its ability to open up certain double spending attacks. Most wallet implementations of RBF use ‘Opt-in’ RBF, as described in BIP
125.
An alteration to mempool policies–how transactions are selected and packaged by miners into blocks–necessarily changes Bitcoin mining economics. The sudden increase in the average transaction fee will have three secondary effects that will further impact average transaction fees differently, if RBF becomes widely adopted by nodes, wallets and users.
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