Author: Tamas Blummer 2013-06-20 08:17:04
Published on: 2013-06-20T08:17:04+00:00
In a discussion about the Bitcoin protocol on the Bitcoin-development mailing list, Tamas Blummer suggests bumping the version and parsing certain fields as mandatory going forward to eliminate complexity that has no benefit. Mike Hearn questions why this change should be made now instead of waiting until there is an actual new field to add. He also argues that the Bitcoin protocol does not require all messages to have a fixed number of fields per version, and any parser written with this assumption was just buggy. Instead, old versions are supposed to preserve fields from the future. There is a suggestion to update BIP37 to say that it is optional only if the flag added in BIPXX is not present.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T19:11:01.279106+00:00