Author: Mike Hearn 2013-06-20 08:31:34
Published on: 2013-06-20T08:31:34+00:00
The Bitcoin protocol has a trivial and minor detail: an optional field in the version message. The complexity cannot be eliminated yet, as it would prevent communication with old nodes. However, versions prior to a particular version can be safely dropped at connect time when they are hard-forked off. Tamas Blummer suggests that the elimination of this complexity would strengthen the system, and Mike Hearn agrees but argues that this should be deferred until there is an actual new field to add. Any parser written on the assumption that the Bitcoin protocol requires all messages to have a fixed number of fields per version is buggy. The raw byte stream is stored and relayed to ensure that fields added in new versions are not dropped during round-tripping. Old versions are supposed to preserve fields from the future.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T19:11:59.858829+00:00