Author: Jannes Faber 2015-12-04 12:44:52
Published on: 2015-12-04T12:44:52+00:00
The Bitcoin community is discussing the potential benefits of a Blockchain verification flag, which would be used by miners to signal that they have completely validated the content of their block and all blocks preceding it. The idea has been proposed as a solution to the issue of some miners not verifying blocks for economically rational reasons, which can harm the system. However, if miners were to use this signalling mechanism, otherwise harmful validation skipping could become beneficial to the network. Correct use of this signalling is not enforced internally to the network but if used it can act as a hint allowing more intelligent risk analysis. If deployed and adhered to, this mechanism turns otherwise harmful validation skipping by miners into a behavior which benefits the public. The authors of non-verifying clients should keep in mind that this flag is only correct with the cooperation of the block author, and even then a validating miner may still accidentally accept or produce an invalid block due to faulty hardware or software. Additionally, any miner which correctly uses this flag could stop doing so at any time, and might do so intentionally in order to increase the effectiveness of an attack. As a result of misunderstanding, misconfiguration, laziness, or other human factors some miners may falsely set the flag. Because invalid blocks are rare it may take a long time to detect misuse of the flag.It is recommended that once this BIP is widely accepted by the network that non-full-node wallets refrain from counting confirmations on blocks where the bit is not set. This proposal suggests a communication channel and describes its use and the motivations for it. It is believed that signaling the behavior is a necessary component for risk mitigation here.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T01:36:54.323930+00:00