PR Review Club : Settxfeerate

[Prabhat1308]

Session Details

Date: 21-11-2024
Time: IST 20:00 (UTC 14:30)
Link: PR #30886
Difficulty: Medium

Motivation:

New RPC call settxfeerate is added. It does the same as the actual settxfee but takes the feerate in sat/vB instead of B/kvB.

settxfee still available but hidden so we avoid incompatibility problems with applications that use that RPC call.
When deprecation is desired, the process should be as simple as just delete settxfee RPC call function and correct the tests where it is called.

Questions:

1.What is the need to change the fee rate from sat/vB to B/kvB.
2.What is the difference between interaction with a RPC directly or with general help ?

Learnings:

RPC
Wallet

[Prabhat1308]

What is the need to change the fee rate from sat/vB to B/kvB.

It has been the industry standard to use sat/vB as the rate which can be seen in most block explorers like mempoolspace and wallets like sparrow and blockstream green. Another benefit is that since there are 10e8 sats in 1 BTC , we get a smaller unit to measure rate and the calculation can be done in whole numbers instead of decimals which reduces the risks of potential errors because of handlinf the calculations in decimals itself. It also makes it easier to calculate the prices in fiat for a reference since the projected price of Bitcoin is supposed to go higher in the long run making it also easier to express the rate when we refer to the spending in fiat.

What is the difference between interaction with a RPC directly or with general help ?

When we use bitcoin-cli help we refer to the general help. This is what the user uses the most and is most user facing . Generally the deprecated RPCs are not put in here so the users don't have access to it. Although when we call the RPC directly which is mostly what the developers would do , we can access it and use it in testing environments.