Author: Tamas Blummer 2013-06-20 08:39:10
Published on: 2013-06-20T08:39:10+00:00
In an email exchange between Tamás Blummer, the Founder and CEO of Bitsofproof, and Mike Hearn, a Bitcoin developer, they discuss the complexity of the Bitcoin system and how it should not keep them from addressing low-complexity issues. The discussion centers around an optional field in the version message and its complexity in comparison to the rest of the system. Mike argues that compared to the scripting language which is full of opcodes nobody has figured out how to use, and the protocol which uses a mixture of byte orders, this issue is trivial and hardly worth thinking about. Tamás agrees that it can be deferred until there is an actual new field without any harm but believes that eliminating complexity strengthens the system. They also discuss the backward compatibility of the issue and suggest bumping the version and parsing the fields as mandatory going forward to maintain cleanliness.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T19:13:04.008545+00:00