Author: Gregory Maxwell 2014-12-30 04:51:51
Published on: 2014-12-30T04:51:51+00:00
A proposal has been made to allow miners to voluntarily lock funds through adding additional inputs to the coinbase transaction. Currently, the coinbase transaction only allows a pseudo-input. This would require a hard fork, which could be included in the next hard fork. The code modifications required are minimal and involve removing code rather than adding. If the motivation is purely enabling different rules in a soft-fork, then no action needs to be taken. Instead of providing inputs to a coinbase, an anyone can spend transaction paying fees can be added to the block, with a soft-fork rule that makes the anyone can spend rule no longer anyone can spend. To make this more efficient, the anyone can spend output can be "PUSH OP_NOP3", making it a coinbase input. This construction is flexible and could control data under the hash in more ways than existing sighash flags. It should be noted that making coinbases have inputs may not be a simple modification, as one of the inputs is already used as the special coinbase field and must be special cased.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T19:37:14.255304+00:00