Dogecoin Development

One option to cancel a transaction is to spend the same inputs (coins) to different outputs (recipients) and hope that the miners mine that new transaction instead of your original one. The problem with this is that the first transaction they saw they are supposed to mine. So since your corrected transaction was broadcast later, chances are high that it will not be the one that the miners mine.

The option Bitcoin uses is that if there are conflicting transactions, it uses the one with the highest fee to include in the next block. They call it "Replace by Fee" (RBF). This sounds like a good solution, but coupled with throttled bandwidth means this makes every block into a bidding war where transaction fees go to the moon and you need an AI assistant just to keep bidding on your behalf to actually get your transaction in the next block.

That is bitcoin's intention, to create a "fee market" which is just an innocuous sounding way to say they want fees to go to infinity to subsidize miners to replace the block reward which eventually goes away.

We don't need fees to subsidize miners in dogecoin since our block reward of 10,000 dogecoin per minute does that sufficiently for at least a few hundred years (until the effective inflation rate goes basically to zero, or even negative when accounting for people loosing wallets as a post in this reddit has previously described).

Since we don't have any ulterior motives, we could use the simplest and most foolproof method to cancel a transaction (which hasnot yet been mined) which is to create a "Replace by Asking" (RBA) system where your replacement transaction can sign over the old transaction. This way miners know the replacement transaction is the one they need to include in the next block, because it's signature shows that it knew about the original transaction and that it is asking to change it. This is safe because the same private key that signed the original is the same as the one that signed the replacement transaction, so we can be 100% sure the same person made both. The most obvious way would be to use the same inputs as the original transaction (just to be safe, overwriting the ability of the original to ever be included in a block) but to change the outputs to go back to yourself or another recipient.

The only issue with this is it incentivizes long block times for spenders since they would want as much time to change a transaction as possible. Recievers (merchants) would want short block times so that you can't change the transaction and "take back" your payment.

What is the solution to this dilemma? My thought is to create another feature, "Sleepy Mode". It is pretty much just like the twitter feature that delays sending the tweet for a few minutes so that you have a chance to edit it. Basically if you set your wallet to Sleepy Mode, when you send dogecoin there would be a delay, perhaps up to 30 minutes (even 20 mins may be good enough, and probably should let the user set a custom sleep time), before the transaction is actually broadcast to the network. This would mean that if you change your mind at any time within 30 minutes of sending the transaction, that you can go back and cancel or edit it with no problems, since you never actually broadcast it to the network. If you don't cancel/change it, then after the 30 min timer expires, the transaction automatically broadcasts. This would obviously not work for Point of Sale (PoS) transactions since it takes too long, but if you are buying something online it should work (assuming the sleepy mode timer fits into the 'time limit for payments' that some merchants require to prevent price fluctuations).

Sleepy mode would increase latency which is beneficial for the customer, while still incentivizing fastest blocktimes possible which is what merchants want, and allows customers to have the fastest in-person payment experience. Sleepy mode in conjunction with RBA, and eventually bringing blocktimes down to ~7 seconds, Dogecoin would be a very powerful payment processor.

I think Dogecoin's roadmap should focus on improving dogecoin as a payment processor, instead of the desire to make Dogecoin into Bitcoin (like with Segwit, Taproot, RBF, Lightning, and all that junk). We can all see now where the Bitcoin road leads, and we don't need to make their same irreversible mistakes that they have. Dogecoin was largely created by fixing/avoiding Bitcoin's shortcomings. Let the developers know what you think in the comments below!