Author: Thomas Guyot-Sionnest 2017-08-22 23:29:41
Published on: 2017-08-22T23:29:41+00:00
In an email thread discussing the possibility of coins "expiring" after X years, Rodney Morris via bitcoin-dev argues that if such a feature were to be seriously considered, the entire ecosystem should be given X*N years warning, where N > 1.5 and X would need to be closer to the lifespan of a human than zero. He suggests that this "feature" would need to be coded and deployed as a future-hard-fork X*N years ahead of time, with transparency around the change being radical and absolute. Morris also suggests that, similar to CheckLockTimeVerify (CLTV), it only makes sense to discuss creating a "never expire" transaction output if such a feature were being seriously considered. He warns that discussions around this topic would be more difficult than those around a block size increase, and that it is unreasonable to conflate this discussion with what to do when ECC or SHA256 is broken.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T03:44:58.036108+00:00