Why does Bisq still allow unconfirmed transactions to be used to open an offer?

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1

I can see how this made sense in 2015, but with full blocks and large spam attacks, we’re now seeing a steep rise in offers that never hit the blockchain because the taker or maker funds were never confirmed, and have too low a fee to confirm during the total length of the trade.

This is a huge problem, as the party whose transactions HAD been confirmed when the offer was accepted takes a total loss on the fees, AND has no recourse to the counterparty’s deposit, since it was never confirmed.

  1. Am I understanding this wrong?
  2. Isn’t this a huge risk that makes Bisq undependable and highly risky for essentially no reason (other than to make things slightly more convenient)?
  3. Why doesn’t Bisq just require that funds have 1 confirmation before allowing a given transaction to be included in the Available Balance?
2

The deposit tx uses the inputs of both traders. If one would do a double-spend or RBF the deposit tx is invalid so no harm to the other trader beside loss of time.
Requiring confirmation decreases the usability as you have to wait longer before you can start trading or making an offer.

3

I wasn’t referring to double-spends as the risk. The risk is loss of fees and no trade going thru after waiting for the entire duration of the trade.

Isn’t that a much more serious usability issue than having to wait for a confirmation before trading?

4

Those problems with not confirmed transactions nearly never happened before. There have been some issues over the last 2 months and with the 0.6.4 release those should be hopefully resolved.