Here is the solution to the “RBF” message. Three days ago, I received a small amount of bitcoin. It was a conversion of $10 of Steem dollars (SBD) to bitcoin via the service blocktrades.us - which is the one which comes up on the Steemit website when you go to your wallet, click on the “down” arrow next to “STEEM” and select “sell”. I only received around $4 worth of bitcoin by the time it reached by paper wallet. I’m not sure where the difference went? Fees?
Anyway, today I was looking at the transaction in the blockchain App. I noticed a triangle warning.
What could this warning mean?
Clicking in the red triangle gave me the following page:
“May be at risk for a double spend”
My next stop was to visit blochain.info.
Again, I see the warning triangle:
Clicking on the triangle then gives a message “This transaction has been flagged as replace by fee (RBF)”, as per the below picture.
I had never seen such a message before and so I googled to find out what it means,
I found the answer, which I quote verbatim from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1868794.0.
‘It means the person who sent that transaction can change the fee of that transaction and send a new one (the transaction is replaceable).
And as always an unconfirmed transaction is still an unconfirmed transaction and unsafe and you should wait for appropriate number of confirmation.
Once it is confirmed (especially once it is over the 5-6 confirmations) nothing is going to change that transaction in the blockchain... that is the whole point of the blockchain. The warning is really for people who are happy to accept zero-confirmation transactions and provide goods and/or services without waiting for at least 1 confirmation.
If the transaction is marked as RBF and IF it still has zero-confirmations, there is a possibility that the person who sent it could then resend the transaction with a higher fee, sending the money back to themselves (or someone else) and hope that a miner includes that transaction in a mined block first.
On the plus side, "RBF" is a useful way for people to be able to help shift stuck transactions... if they had used a stupid low fee of like 10sats/byte and it was stuck in the mempool... they could effectively redo the transaction with a 160sats/byte fee to try and help it get confirmed.
The idea being, if a transaction is RBF and not from a trusted source, DON'T trust it until gets at least 1 confirmation.
Your transaction to your exchange is probably just unconfirmed because the network is crazy busy right now... loads of unconfirmed transactions. I doubt it has anything to do with the RBF transaction. I hope you used a decent fee for your transfer to the exchange.”
I hope this helps others who may see a similar message.
Hopefully Steemit doesn’t mind me quoting the Bitcointalk.com message, especially as I put the full link. I don’t want to be accused of plagerism. It was an excellent explanation. I could not have put it more eloquently myself.