Mempool Replacements

Current Replace-by-Fee Policy

A transaction conflicts with an in-mempool transaction ("directly conflicting transaction") if they spend one or more of the same inputs. A transaction may conflict with multiple in-mempool transactions.

A transaction ("replacement transaction") may replace its directly conflicting transactions and their in-mempool descendants (together, "original transactions") if, in addition to passing all other consensus and policy rules, each of the following conditions are met:

1. (Removed)

1. (Removed)

1. The replacement transaction pays an absolute fee of at least the sum paid by the original

transactions.

Rationale: Only requiring the replacement transaction to have a higher feerate could allow an attacker to bypass node minimum relay feerate requirements and cause the network to repeatedly relay slightly smaller replacement transactions without adding any more fees. Additionally, if any of the original transactions would be included in the next block assembled by an economically rational miner, a replacement policy allowing the replacement transaction to decrease the absolute fees in the next block would be incentive-incompatible.

1. The additional fees (difference between absolute fee paid by the replacement transaction and the

sum paid by the original transactions) pays for the replacement transaction's bandwidth at or above the rate set by the node's incremental relay feerate. For example, if the incremental relay feerate is 0.1 satoshi/vB and the replacement transaction is 500 virtual bytes total, then the replacement pays a fee at least 50 satoshis higher than the sum of the original transactions.

Rationale: Try to prevent DoS attacks where an attacker causes the network to repeatedly relay transactions each paying a tiny additional amount in fees, e.g. just 1 satoshi.

1. The number of distinct clusters corresponding to conflicting transactions does not exceed 100.

Rationale: Limit CPU usage required to update the mempool for so many transactions being removed at once.

1. The feerate diagram of the mempool must be strictly improved by the replacement transaction.

Rationale: This ensures that block fees in all future blocks will go up after the replacement (ignoring tail effects at the end of a block).

History

• Opt-in full replace-by-fee (without inherited signaling) honoured in mempool and mining as of

v0.12.0 (PR 6871).

• BIP125 defined based on

Bitcoin Core implementation.

• The incremental relay feerate used to calculate the required additional fees is distinct from

-minrelaytxfee and configurable using -incrementalrelayfee (PR #9380).

• RBF enabled by default in the wallet GUI as of v0.18.1 ([PR

#11605](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/11605)).

• Full replace-by-fee enabled as a configurable mempool policy as of v24.0 ([PR

#25353](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/25353)).

• Full replace-by-fee is the default policy as of v28.0 (PR #30493).

• Signaling for replace-by-fee is no longer required as of PR 30592.

• The incremental relay feerate default is 0.1sat/vB (PR #33106).

• Feerate diagram policy enabled in conjunction with switch to cluster mempool as of v31.0.