Consensus rules keep Bitcoin honest. Relay policies keep it efficient — and they're yours to configure.
If consensus rules are the Constitution, relay policies are the administrative procedures. They don't define what Bitcoin is. They define how your node interacts with the network day-to-day.
Relay policies control things like: which transactions your node forwards, how many peers it connects to, how large its mempool is, what it logs, and what data it serves via RPC. These settings do not affect the integrity of the blockchain. They affect your node's resource usage, privacy, and user experience.
"A central bank's policy changes affect everyone in the economy. Your node's relay policy changes affect only your node. That's not a bug — it's the entire point of running your own node."
The Nixon Shock parallel: central banks have "relay policies" too — they adjust interest rates, reserve requirements, and money supply. And these changes affect everyone. Your Bitcoin node has relay policies that are just as configurable, but the impact is contained to you. The sovereignty is individual, not systemic.
What it controls: The minimum fee rate your node will relay.
1 sat/vB. You can set it higher (save bandwidth) or lower (help low-fee transactions propagate).This is the most intuitive relay policy. Set it to 2 sat/vB and your node ignores transactions below that threshold — they're still valid, your node just won't forward them. Other nodes with lower thresholds may still relay them. A miner can still mine them.
What it controls: How much memory your node dedicates to storing unconfirmed transactions.
300 MB mempool. Your node evicts the lowest-fee transactions when it's full.During high-fee periods, your node's mempool fills up and starts evicting low-fee transactions. These transactions aren't lost — they just aren't in your mempool. They can still be relayed by other nodes with larger mempools or lower fee thresholds, and they can still be mined.
What it controls: Whether your node will replace an unconfirmed transaction with a higher-fee version of the same transaction.
mempoolfullrbf=0 (only full-RBF opt-in). Set to 1 to accept all replacements.RBF is controversial. Some node operators disable it to protect the "first-seen" principle. Others enable it to give users the ability to bump stuck transactions. Both choices are valid. Neither affects the security or integrity of the blockchain — only which transactions your node is willing to relay.
Your node also decides who it talks to and what it reveals:
125 outbound+inbound connections. Lower reduces bandwidth. Higher improves network connectivity. Your choice.100. You can raise or lower it.onlynet=onion to only connect over Tor.Here's the test you can apply to any Bitcoin rule to decide whether it's consensus or relay:
If every node on the network accepted it, would Bitcoin still work?
If the answer is "yes, but slower or with more spam" → it's a relay policy (bandwidth/performance preference).
If the answer is "no, the blockchain would be inconsistent" → it's a consensus rule (integrity requirement).
This is why a transaction with a 0.1 sat/vB fee is simultaneously "valid" (consensus) and "ignored by most nodes" (relay). The relay policy is a gatekeeper for efficiency, not for correctness.
And this is also why the Nixon Shock cannot happen in Bitcoin. The consensus rules that define Bitcoin's money supply are immune to relay preferences. No matter how many node operators decide to change their fee filter, the 21 million cap remains enforced.
If you run a node, relay policies are your first taste of monetary sovereignty. You decide what transactions to relay. You decide who connects to you. You decide what data to keep. These are small choices in isolation, but they represent something unprecedented: a monetary system where the individual operator has real agency.
You don't have to accept the defaults. You can tune your node to match your values — privacy-maximal, bandwidth-minimal, censorship-resistant, whatever you prioritize.
That's the opposite of the Nixon Shock. In 1971, a decision was made at the top and imposed on everyone. In Bitcoin, decisions made at the bottom (your node) affect only you.
"The Nixon Shock was when one man's policy override affected the whole world. Your relay policy override affects one node. That's not a limitation — that's the revolution."