On Fri, May 02, 2025 at 08:06:18PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > So the mempoolfullrbf default changed from false to true in 28.0 released > in October last year, which is advertised as being run by maybe 30%-40% > of the network now, and fullrbf transactions have been reportedly been mined > reliably since well before that. > > Any chance of an update on how that change has affected bitcoin/lightning > payment volume for you guys, or customer satisfaction (if payment > acceptance is delayed more often), or how much engineering/support time > was needed to adapt, or any other impact?
There was a related thread on X late last year that offers some relevant information for these questions: https://x.com/MattAhlborg/status/1828436316930912364 Some key points from that thread, IMO: * The "relative volume" metric shows a drop in bitcoin/lightning volume from 30%-40% in 2022 to 25%-30% in late 2024 * The "monthly active users" metric shows a drop in bitcoin/lightning volume from about 50% to about 40% in a similar timeframe, as well as a large switch from on-chain to lightning * The "average payment size" metric shows distinctly different behaviours between on-chain bitcoin users and lightning users -- individual on-chain payments are about 4x greater in value than individual lightning payments * Bitrefill stopped accepting zeroconf transactions in Aug/Sep 2023; they didn't indicate if this was due to seeing a rise in (attempted?) fraud, or a purely preventative measure. * The charts show definite correlations between the decrease in on-chain activity with fee spikes * The charts don't show obvious correlations between on-chain activity and when bitrefill stopped accepting zeroconf transactions. At best you could argue this shows up as volume not returning to on-chain bitcoin after the fee spikes eased. * This may also be due to a rise in use of bitrefill accounts -- ie, you send a bunch of money to top up your bitrefill account, and then later spend small amounts from that. Doing that provides some insulation from the impact of both on-chain fees and confirmation delays. The thread doesn't give details on how that has changed over time, so there's no indication if there's any correlation with either dropping support for zeroconf or with fee spikes. * Much of the lightning monthly active users (>50%) is due to a business partnership, where the users don't end up using lightning directly. The author speculates that as little as 12.5% (or as much as 25%) of the lightning payments they see are from users who control their own keys. That's not super positive for bitcoin (as a payments system) overall -- lightning growth seems to be almost entirely in the B2B zone, rather than the P2P zone, in particular. It doesn't seem to indicate huge problems resulting from how mempoolfullrbf was handled; though if "just custody funds with bitrefill" was a significant mitigating factor, perhaps that's not terribly positive either from a P2P, be-your-own-bank perspective. IMO, anyway. Thanks to John Carvalho for the pointer to the thread. Cheers, aj -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Bitcoin Development Mailing List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcoindev/aBmgk4nqULp2_5GA%40erisian.com.au.
