Electrum, one of the Bitcoin wallets with the longest history in the ecosystem, showed on its Twitter account its support for the proposal to add Full RBF to the Bitcoin protocol.
In a tweet where they refer to a popular bitcoiner saying “if it’s not your keys, it’s not your coins”, the Electrum team added: “if it’s not confirmed, it’s not your coins either”.
What is RBF
Full RBF (replace-by-fee) is a proposal to add to the Bitcoin protocol the possibility for a user to replace the fee paid for a transaction. The purpose of this procedure is to speed up the payment and for the transaction to be added to a block more quickly. It should be noted that once the payment already has a confirmation, RBF does not take effect.
Replacing transaction fees is already possible in Bitcoin, but it is an option that is up to the wallet creators to offer to their users or not. If Full RBF is activated, the ability to replace fees would be available to all Bitcoin users, regardless of the wallet they use to interact with the network and make payments.
The debate on whether or not to add Full RBF to Bitcoin
Bitcoin developers have been discussing for several weeks whether or not to add Full RBF to the bitcoin code and, if so, how and when it would be most appropriate to take that step. There is a group of developers in favor of Full RBF who argue that its implementation can prevent vulnerabilities in future attack vectors.
There is also a group of developers against Full RBF who argue that this initiative would make it impossible for merchants and platforms to accept payments without confirmations, as they currently do. Their position is based on the fact that, if a merchant accepts an unconfirmed payment, someone could use RBF to reverse the payment or double-spend.
In short, Full RBF would make it easier to defraud these platforms. Therefore, those who receive payments without confirmations would have to abandon that practice and always wait at least 10 minutes for the payment to be confirmed.
