Author: Gregory Maxwell 2017-07-07 23:22:38
Published on: 2017-07-07T23:22:38+00:00
A proposal for a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) has been released by Sergio Demian Lerner to match the reference code that the Segwit2x group has built and published a week ago. However, many believe that the timeline of the proposal is too short and violates responsible engineering practices since it is shorter than even a fast development and release candidate timeframe. Additionally, the proposal carries an extreme risk for parties to lose money due to transaction reversals at two distinct points in time and provides no proposed countermeasures to avoid these losses. The proposal also adds another gratuitous limit to the system, a maximum transaction size where none existed before, yet this limit is almost certainly too small to prevent actual DOS attacks while it is also technically larger than any transaction that can be included today.The cited paper does an approximate best case analysis considering only a couple of risk factors and concluded that 4MB was the largest they could argue was safe. Moreover, the proposal is unable to distinguish itself from BIP-91. It seems highly likely that just activating segwit will substantially disrupt the fee market; to say nothing for the further doubling that isn't even tempered by new wallet adoptions. In effect, the document admits that it isn't a solution that meaningfully improves the scale or scalability but rather it's just a bailout to temporarily lower/negate transaction fees. Additionally, the document doesn't really make an effort to justify the bailout at all and doesn't explain how it will result in anything except an endless series of additional fee bailouts. Furthermore, it doesn't discuss any remediation against the replay exposure that the proposed hardfork is sure to create.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T03:10:31.507343+00:00