Author: Jorge Timón 2016-02-05 09:58:36
Published on: 2016-02-05T09:58:36+00:00
On the bitcoin-dev mailing list, a discussion was had regarding the addition of Concept ACK to BIP99. Gavin Andresen pointed out that if full nodes are not upgraded, a block with a negative version number could fork them off the chain, similarly to a block with new hard-forking consensus rules. He suggested that a better idea would be a BIP that recommends SPV clients pay attention to block version numbers in headers and warn if there is a soft or hard fork they don't know about. However, SPV nodes can't tell whether a change is a hardfork or softfork just by looking at the version bits, making it even more important to set the hardfork bit for controversial hardforks where bip9 should NOT be used for deployment. Regarding timestamps, it was suggested that SPV clients should pay attention to them to mitigate Sybil attacks, but this is out of scope for the current proposal.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T03:34:40.192184+00:00