From: Matt Whitlock <bip@mattwhitlock.name>
To: bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2015 16:39:41 -0400
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Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] F2Pool has enabled full replace-by-fee
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On Friday, 19 June 2015, at 9:18 am, Adrian Macneil wrote:
> If full-RBF sees any significant adoption by miners, then it will actively
> harm bitcoin adoption by reducing or removing the ability for online or POS
> merchants to accept bitcoin payments at all.

Retail POS merchants probably should not be accepting vanilla Bitcoin payments, as Bitcoin alone does not (and cannot) guarantee the irreversibility of a transaction until it has been buried several blocks deep in the chain. Retail merchants should be requiring a co-signature from a mutually trusted co-signer that vows never to sign a double-spend. The reason we don't yet see such technology permeating the ecosystem is because, to date, zero-conf transactions have been irreversible "enough," but this has only been a happy accident; it was never promised, and it should not be relied upon.