Author: Mike Hearn 2013-06-20 09:17:11
Published on: 2013-06-20T09:17:11+00:00
During a discussion about the Bitcoin protocol, Mike Hearn suggested that there is no need to add a new version field unless there's actually a new field to add. He also pointed out that the Bitcoin protocol does not and never has required that all messages have a fixed number of fields per version. Pieter Wuille disagreed, saying that what was being argued for was that the version in the version message itself should indicate which fields are present, so a parser doesn't need to look at the length of the message. Pieter believed that raising the protocol version number to indicate "all fields up to fRelayTxes are required, if the announced nVersion is above N" would not be a problem. In fact, he said that all previous additions to the version message were accompanied with a protocol version increase as well. Ultimately, the decision was made to keep things flexible for the future by maintaining the number of fields in a message as a little version number, just for that message, adding flexibility and costing nothing.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T19:13:21.953009+00:00