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How to Accelerate Your Bitcoin Transactions With CPFP
Shailee Adinolfi
&
Annie Pei
General Wallet Use
Accelerating your Bitcoin transactions using CPFP involves creating a new transaction that will take the place of the original transaction. CPFP is used to speed up transactions when the original (parent) transaction lacks sufficient funding to be processed quickly by miners. The new (child) transaction speeds up the processing of the original transaction because it contains a higher transaction fee.
What is CPFP?
CPFP stands for Child Pays For Parent, and is a Bitcoin transaction technique that speeds up pending transactions. A new transaction with higher associated fees replaces another transaction which either lacks the funding to be processed, or has such a low value that it is not worth miners’ time and computing power to process.
Do Bitcoin Accelerators Work?
Yes, Bitcoin transaction accelerators like CPFP and RBF work by incentivizing miners to confirm the original, slowly-confirming transactions which lack sufficiently high attached fees by allowing them to collect the higher fees associated with the new transaction.
What Is a CPFP Transaction?
A Bitcoin CPFP transaction is a transaction wherein the recipient of a slowly-confirming (due to low associated fees) or stuck (due to insufficient funds to pay fees) transaction creates a new transaction using the funds from the previous transaction, and pays a higher fee for the new transaction. This new transaction represents the child transaction, and the original transaction is called the parent transaction.
How Does Child Pays for Parent Work?
First, it is important to know that Bitcoin transactions are only eligible if they have been waiting to confirm for at least four hours, and must have all inputs confirmed.
After that, the recipient of the transaction can choose to create a new transaction containing the funds from the transaction for which they are waiting, and pay an increased transaction fee which will incentivize miners to push that transaction across the line quickly.
What Is the Difference Between CPFP and RBF?
CPFP: The recipient of a Bitcoin transaction creates a new (child) transaction using the funds from the original (parent) transaction and pays the new, higher transaction fee to push it across the line more quickly.
RBF: In a Replace By Fee (RBF) transaction, the sender replaces their unconfirmed transaction with a new version of that transaction that has a higher transaction fee. RBF allows senders to raise the fee to confirm their transaction faster.
How to Use CPFP to Accelerate Your Bitcoin Runes Transactions
Runes is a Bitcoin native token protocol that empowers issuers to create and manage their own tokens directly on the Bitcoin blockchain. They differ from BRC-20 tokens by using a separate data storage model. The data for BRC-20 tokens (as well as Ordinals), are included in the witness data of transactions. In contrast, Runes interface directly within Bitcoin's Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) model. UTXO is technical jargon for a coin or spendable unit within the bitcoin network.
CPFP works similarly here, but in order to speed up the transaction, you’ll need to make sure you’re transacting with Bitcoin, instead of the Rune, in order to push the transaction through on the Bitcoin network itself.