Author: Tom 2016-08-01 09:30:22
Published on: 2016-08-01T09:30:22+00:00
The author discusses two proposals that aim to address issues with Bitcoin transactions: Segregated Witness (SegWit) and Flexible Transactions. While SegWit aims to solve several transaction issues, the author argues that it introduces more technical debt and does not fix all problems. In contrast, Flexible Transactions proposes a new tag-based data structure for transactions that is flexible, backward compatible, and solves the malleability issue.Flexible Transactions offers several advantages over SegWit, including smaller transaction sizes, extensibility, and lower technical debt. The proposal can be implemented in a consistent manner, making it more backwards compatible and requiring fewer changes to the entire ecosystem. It also has a lower risk of failures during or after upgrading than SegWit.The author suggests that dropping the requirement of staying backwards compatible with SegWit should be considered given the issues found after a year of its design stage. Flexible Transactions is presented as a one-time hard fork to upgrade the protocol, allowing future changes with lower impact on the system.One key aspect of the Flexible Transactions proposal is the use of binary tags instead of closed, binary blobs, which makes the format more flexible and extensible. Additionally, the author suggests using an unused NOP code in Script to fix the broken OP_CHECKSIG scripting instruction.Overall, the benefits of the Flexible Transactions upgrade are significant, especially when compared to pruning over SegWit. The proposal offers a more efficient and effective solution to Bitcoin transaction issues, and its implementation would have a lower impact on the system.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T19:15:33.091549+00:00