Author: Gavin Andresen 2016-02-04 22:15:41
Published on: 2016-02-04T22:15:41+00:00
The proposal for negative block version numbers has been questioned by Gavin Andresen, who argues that it does not improve the situation regarding chain-forking. For SPV clients that do not pay attention to versions in block headers, setting the block version negative would not help them. In contrast, if full nodes are not upgraded, a block with a negative version number would fork them off the chain in the same way as a block with new hard-forking consensus rules would, leading to a worthless minority chain continuing on with the old rules. Furthermore, if non-upgraded SPV clients connect to the old, non-upgraded full nodes, the proposed Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) would not help. Andresen suggests that a better BIP recommendation would be for SPV clients to pay attention to block version and timestamp numbers in the headers they download, which will warn if there is a soft or hard fork they don't know about and mitigate Sybil attacks.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T03:35:09.335279+00:00