Author: Peter Todd 2016-02-04 18:19:35
Published on: 2016-02-04T18:19:35+00:00
In a Bitcoin development email thread, Gavin Andresen states his opinion that the BIP is unnecessary. He takes issue with items two and three of the proposal's motivations. The second item is that nodes may not be aware of the deployment of a hard fork, leading them to accept devalued legacy tokens. Andresen believes that if a hard fork increases the version number in blocks, like soft forks, then there is no risk since full and SPV nodes should notice that they are seeing up-version blocks and warn the user that they are using obsolete software. However, he notes that there is no guarantee that nodes will see those blocks and that current network behavior does not work towards such guarantees, even in the non-adversarial case. Finally, Andresen claims that he knows of no currently deployed SPV wallet software that warns users about unknown block versions.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T03:35:00.271655+00:00