Author: Mark Friedenbach 2015-12-09 06:59:43
Published on: 2015-12-09T06:59:43+00:00
The discussion is regarding the placement of the witness commitment in Bitcoin's consensus critical code. Gregory Maxwell argues that it would be more feasible to place it in an available location which is compatible with the existing network, rather than making an incompatible upgrade that could disrupt the network. He suggests that if reorganization is desired, it should be done as part of a separate change that changes only the location of things and proceeds in a fashion that minimizes disruption and risk. Furthermore, he highlights the complexity of Bitcoin's engineering experience in a public, world-wide, multi-vendor, multi-version, inter-operable, distributed system, which makes complete testing infeasible. Therefore, testing is essential but one cannot "unit test" away all the risks related to deploying a new behavior in the network. Ryan Butler questions the need for such a change and asserts that placing things in consensus critical code when it doesn't need to be is not akin to structural tidying.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T01:42:47.958643+00:00