Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town

One Shot Replace-By-Fee-Rate
2024-01-26 , Btrust Stage

Transaction pinning has been a longstanding concern, particularly BIP-125 Rule #3 pinning, where a large, low fee-rate, transaction prevents the confirmation of a small, high fee-rate, transaction. While replace-by-fee-rate has been long known to be a solution for Rule #3 pinning, it has been thought to have unavoidable DoS attacks and incentive issues.

Here we will show that a variant, One-Shot Replace-By-Fee-Rate, fixes these DoS attacks and miner incentives sufficiently well to be implementable in Bitcoin Core.


Transaction pinning has been a longstanding concern, particularly BIP-125 Rule #3 pinning, where a large, low fee-rate, transaction prevents the confirmation of a small, high fee-rate, transaction. While replace-by-fee-rate has been long known to be a solution for Rule #3 pinning, it has been thought to have unavoidable DoS attacks and incentive issues.

Here we will show that a variant, One-Shot Replace-By-Fee-Rate, fixes these DoS attacks and miner incentives sufficiently well to be implementable in Bitcoin Core. We'll discuss how One-Shot Replace-By-Fee-Rate works, why it fixes transaction pinning, and what implications it has for DoS attacks and miner incentives.

Known for creating OpenTimestamps and contributing to Bitcoin Core, as well as giving a lot of conference talks.