Opt-in RBF (Replace-By-Fee) is a useful feature of bitcoin mesh network and will help the development of the cryptocurrency. Thus spoke Stephen Pair, CEO and Co-founder of BitPay.

The RBF is a mechanism that allows a wallet to increase transaction processing fee so that miners have extra incentive to do it. According to the Bitcoin Core site, the Opt-in RBF will be introduced with the new version of the Core 0.12, which will appear soon. BitPay will embrace the new feature.

“We support it because it adds a useful feature to the Bitcoin mesh network. In fact, more than a year ago we were trying to figure out how we ourselves would lobby for this capability as it is an enabler for an internal project we’ve been working on. We were thrilled when we saw that Opt-In RBF was merged,” says Stephen Pair.

The common objection to RBF states that it increases the risk of double-spend. The Core developers claim that this assumption is not based on facts. They have started a series of tests to check the vulnerability of RBF. On 25 January one of the developers, Peter Todd, published the results of a double-spend check on his personal blog.

“We tested a selection of the eight most popular wallets out there, including Blockchain.info, Coinbase, Bitcoin Wallet for Android, Mycelium, Electrum, and others. What we found was every wallet tested did a terrible job of protecting users from zero-conf double-spends,” wrote Todd.

The Core developer confirmed that he considers the introduction of opt-in RBF a positive event. In his blog post Stephen Pair agreed with that.