RBF Debate Is Incentives And Choice – Bitcoin Magazine

This is an opinion editorial by Shinobi, a self-taught educator in the Bitcoin space and tech-oriented Bitcoin podcast host.

Big surprise, Bitcoiners are arguing furiously about a proposed change set to be included in the next release of Bitcoin Core. Opt-in replace-by-fee (RBF) is a mempool policy feature that was proposed in 2015 to give users a tool to deal with quick spikes in fees that lead to their transactions being stuck unconfirmed in the mempool for long stretches of time.

Obviously, this will be a problem for any use of Bitcoin if transaction volume grows on average to be consistently higher than the number of transactions that can be processed in the blockchain, so unless you think that will never happen this is a needed functionality on the network.