Author: Mark Friedenbach 2014-08-06 16:31:24
Published on: 2014-08-06T16:31:24+00:00
In an email conversation between Peter Todd and Christian Decker on August 6, 2014, they discussed adding a new field to the transaction format. Christian Decker expressed his support for the idea of creating a new field as overloading fields with new meaning is not a good idea. However, Peter Todd suggested that the best way to add a new field would be to create a new, parallel transaction format where fields are committed by Merkle radix tree. This way, the new field could be committed in an extensible and provable manner without changing the existing transaction format in a hard-fork.However, another party in the conversation doubted that this approach was the best one. They argued that if the nExpiry field was a consensus rule, then the Merkle tree or appropriate paths through it should be included with the transaction. This would be less efficient and more disruptive than simply adding an nExpiry field to the transaction format. On the other hand, if the field was pre-consensus, then it had no place in the transaction structure and should be packaged in some sort of envelope container.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T01:46:51.128932+00:00