Author: Michael Folkson 2022-04-30 16:25:26
Published on: 2022-04-30T16:25:26+00:00
Carl Dong recently did a short video explaining the libbitcoinkernel project in Bitcoin Core. The project aims to extract the consensus engine out of Bitcoin Core to avoid catastrophic forks caused by disagreements between the consensus engines of nodes across the network. The boundary between what is part of consensus and what is not has occasionally been blurred in the past, leading to some consensus bugs in older versions of Bitcoin Core. This has made it difficult for alternative implementations to be built in other languages and with different RPCs without risking falling out of consensus with Bitcoin Core. The first PR in the series was recently merged and Carl explains his thinking on the future direction of this ambitious long-term project in the video and on the linked issue. Unraveling Satoshi's spaghetti code and the entanglement between the consensus engine and the rest of the codebase has been a decade-long task that requires extreme care and is by no means completed.
Updated on: 2023-05-22T19:49:21.690883+00:00