Author: Gregory Maxwell 2015-01-23 16:05:10
Published on: 2015-01-23T16:05:10+00:00
In an email conversation between Alan Reiner and slush on January 23, 2015, Alan expressed his belief that there was no soft-fork way to achieve a benefit he desired. Soft-forks would require the coins being spent to have originated in a special way and would only work if the coins had entered the wallet with some modified TxOut script, which would not work with existing coins. This would require senders to update their software to reshape the way they send transactions to be compatible with their goals. However, slush believed this was unreasonable and proposed a straightforward soft-fork approach which was safe and did not invalidate existing transactions. This involved using newly created addresses to get coins that used the new signature type for people who wanted the new capability, rather than expecting every other user of the system to replace their software with an incompatible new version just to accommodate their transactions for which they may care nothing about and which would not have any urgent need to change. Additionally, slush mentioned hardware wallets becoming more widespread. He mentioned sitting next to TREZOR for 40 minutes already because it was streaming and validating a complex transaction. Alan requested clarification on what was taking 40 minutes as it was a surprisingly high number. Alan also expected this need to be addressed simply as a side effect of a new, more efficient checksig operator which some people had been working on and off but which had taken a backseat to other more urgent issues.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T19:46:58.579662+00:00