Satoshi’s Ghost Finally Silenced! 👻

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Ah, Bitcoin Core v29. A decree, no less! Finally, the squabbling is done, the digital dust settles. This Full-RBF business, a saga stretching back to when Satoshi himself, that spectral figure, haunted the halls of Bitcointalk with his pronouncements. Now, the option, that rebellious whisper of dissent, “-mempoolfullrbf,” is purged, vanished like a dissident in the Siberian winter. ❄️ They say it defaulted to 1, and now, with “widespread adoption,” it’s simply…gone. As if the people ever had a say in the matter! Such is the illusion of choice in the digital gulag.

The official pronouncements, oh, they are beautiful in their bureaucratic dryness: “Starting with v28.0, the -mempoolfullrbf startup option was set to default to 1. With widespread adoption of this policy, users no longer benefit from disabling it, so the option has been removed, making full replace-by-fee the standard behavior. (#30592)” “No longer benefit,” they say. As if benefit were ever the point! Obedience, comrade, obedience! 🫡

Peter Todd, that veteran of the crypto wars, declares victory on X. “The battle for Full-RBF is finally over.” A decade, he says! A decade of digital trench warfare, all for the glory of… what exactly? He dates it back to 2013, even further if you count Satoshi’s ramblings in 2010. So much wasted time, so much spilled digital ink. 🤦‍♂️

Bitcoin Core v29: The Iron Curtain Descends on Transaction Fees

Full Replace-by-Fee (Full-RBF). A policy that allows the high and mighty to simply shove aside the little transactions, the peasant transactions, with a higher fee. A brutal market, this Bitcoin. Reminds one of the old days, when the rich ate caviar while the poor gnawed on potato peels. This all harkens back to Satoshi, that enigmatic prophet, who briefly mentioned transaction replacement. And then Peter Todd, ever the agitator, pushing for RBF to soothe the woes of those impatient souls whose transactions languished in the mempool abyss. ⏳

The debate. Oh, the debate! It raged like a samovar left unattended. A clash of ideologies, a wrestling match between Bitcoin’s soul and its practicality. On one side, the technocrats, the efficiency experts, extolling the virtues of a fee market where the highest bidder wins. They preach of reliability, of the ability to “bump” fees like some digital Mafioso shaking down merchants. 💰

The opposition? The merchants, the coffee vendors, clinging to their zero-confirmation transactions like a drowning man to a raft. They cry foul, warning of double-spends, of malicious actors wreaking havoc with higher fees. A valid concern, perhaps, but progress, like the relentless march of the Red Army, cannot be stopped. ☕

Zero-confirmation payments, 0-conf as they call it, a fantasy, a fool’s errand. The RBF proponents, ever the pragmatists, scoff at the notion of security in such a flimsy arrangement. Double-spends, they argue, were always possible, a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. 💣

Opt-in RBF in 2016, a compromise, a temporary truce in the endless war. Transactions could wave a white flag, signaling their willingness to be replaced. But miners, those capricious overlords, still held the power of veto. Bitcoin Core, like a slow, lumbering tank, has been grinding toward broader RBF adoption ever since, culminating in this glorious v29, this final surrender to the market forces. ⚙️

The schism. The forks. Bitcoin Cash, that rebellious offspring, rejected RBF, clinging to its precious zero-confirmation features. They accused Bitcoin Core of abandoning the common man, of turning Bitcoin into a mere “store of value.” But the Core developers, those high priests of the Lightning Network, dismissed such concerns, promising instant transactions on second-layer solutions. A promise, mind you, that remains to be seen. ⚡

The miners, as always, followed the scent of profit, gravitating toward policies that maximized fees and network efficiency. But even they hesitated, fearing a fracturing of the network. The merchants, the ATM operators, the zero-confirmation zealots, resisted, for obvious reasons. Yet the tide turned, the momentum grew, fueled by the cold, hard logic of the fee market. 🌊

And now, Bitcoin Core v29. The Rubicon has been crossed. Full-RBF is the law, unyielding, absolute. The debate is over, the chapter closed. A decade-plus of squabbling, of technical minutiae, all culminating in this moment of triumph, or perhaps, of quiet resignation. As Peter Todd himself notes, it all goes back to Satoshi, to that distant voice in the digital wilderness. 🗣️

At press time, BTC traded at $84,024. A price, no doubt, that reflects the true value of… well, who truly knows anymore? 🤷‍♂️

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2025-04-17 10:15