User Experience of Replace By Fee and Child Pays For Parent in open source, non-custodial desktop Bitcoin wallets.

How do you scale a blockchain? You don’t. Block space is inherently limited, and everyone making Bitcoin transactions competes for it. RBF and CPFP are some of the most prominent tools in the toolbox of a user for the block space scarcity competition.

Wallets

I have compiled a list of non-custodial Bitcoin wallets for desktop that are actively being developed and are open source. Please note that I have excluded those that require a hardware wallet since I don’t have access to them in my current location (Ledger Live, Specter, Trezor Suite.)

RBF

RBF, which stands for Replace By Fee, is a feature that allows modification of an unconfirmed Bitcoin transaction to include a higher fee, thus confirming sooner. It is less well-known, but this feature also allows for the cancellation of unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions.

CPFP

CPFP, short for Child Pays For Parent, is also a handy feature that accelerates a transaction by spending one of its outputs with a high fee. This results in a child transaction, paying for the parent transaction. CPFP is especially helpful when we cannot use RBF, such as when receiving a transaction and not owning all the inputs involved.