Author: Steven Blinn 2019-08-02 16:44:01
Published on: 2019-08-02T16:44:01+00:00
In an email thread on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Emil Engler suggested that the moderation of the mailing list was slow and took around 24 hours for an email to be posted. He proposed adding more moderators to shorten the moderation lag and also suggested that people who have already contributed a certain number of emails to the mailing list should not need approval for any future emails. Bryan Bishop responded to Emil's proposal, stating that it shouldn't take 24 hours to moderate the mailing list, and they will find a few more people to help with the moderation.The email thread is a discussion about a proposed moving checkpoint to the Bitcoin protocol. Kenshiro suggests adding a "moving checkpoint" to make the blockchain truly immutable after N blocks, even during a 51% attack. However, Ethan Heilman presents two potential attacks that could exploit this rule and make Bitcoin more vulnerable to 51% attacks. He proposes a safer rule where if a node detects a fork with both sides having length greater than 144 blocks, it halts and requests user intervention to determine which chain to follow. Additionally, the group discusses how a state-sponsored netsplit lasting longer than N would be handled. There is mention of an active software vulnerability in Mailman, causing missing emails that never hit the moderation queue. Linux Foundation is migrating away from or abandoning the email protocol, making them less willing to do backend infrastructure work.Chris Belcher responds to Dmitry Petukhov's proposal for improving JoinMarket's resistance to sybil attacks using fidelity bonds, stating that while TXO fidelity bonds can be rented out, it doesn't make a sybil attack cheaper. The aim of the fidelity bond scheme is to require makers to sacrifice value, and renting out their fidelity bond coins doesn't avoid that sacrifice because the rent paid by the attacker should be about the same as the cost of just buying the bitcoins and locking them. Lastly, Dmitry Petukhov responds to Andrew Chow's proposal for extending BIP 174 for future extensibility, stating that while he did not oppose the idea of having a prefix string, he argued that the set of future users of PSBT and private types is likely much larger than the current set of those who already implemented proprietary types on their own. Therefore, the overall benefit for the whole industry would likely be bigger when 'I do not want conflict avoidance' decision has to be explicit, by setting the prefix to 0x00, and the set of possible conflicting types are limited only to those entities that made this explicit decision.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T20:45:05.120267+00:00