Author: Johnson Lau 2017-01-28 07:28:14
Published on: 2017-01-28T07:28:14+00:00
The Bitcoin-dev mailing list is currently hosting a discussion regarding proposals for changes to the Bitcoin protocol. One of the proposals suggests limiting the creation of unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) and encouraging their spending. Another proposal suggests a smoother halving cycle for block rewards by reducing them by 25% instead of the current stair-step approach. A third proposal involves a new coinbase transaction format that would allow for multiple inputs and a specific previous block hash. This feature would enable miners to pay other miners to confirm their blocks before they become mature. However, implementing this proposal may require commitment of block height of inputs and transaction index in the block, which could present challenges.In addition, there is a proposal for a Merkle sum tree that would allow fraud-proofing for fee and weight. However, a backdoor to disable the sum-tree validation capability in older nodes would be necessary, and some participants question the necessity of the proposed changes and suggest alternatives or delaying implementation until necessary.During the discussion on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list, Matt Corallo cautioned against letting complexity run away in a hard fork, as there are inherent risks involved. Johnson Lau proposed some experimental features for a hard fork and received feedback from Matt. Matt suggested minimizing header size, having only one merkle tree, avoiding variable-length header fields, leaving the transaction merkle root of the old-style header as the hash of the new header, and avoiding complicated max() limits. Johnson Lau also discussed the format of the hard fork and how to keep existing light wallets functioning without an upgrade. The proposal included a totally new way to define tx weight with four metrics, but Matt called this too complex and suggested something much simpler.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T00:18:06.233161+00:00