Author: Mike Hearn 2013-06-20 10:58:31
Published on: 2013-06-20T10:58:31+00:00
The discussion is about increasing the version number and its benefits. Pieter Wuille suggested increasing the version number as it simplifies things and is trivial to do. Turkey Breast disagrees with this change because it causes all previous behaviour to be lost, and optional fields should have their own mechanism that allows them to remain optional fields between protocol version upgrades. Mike Hearn argues that there is no benefit in increasing the version number, but there is also no problem; although, in the future, if there is a need for two optional new pieces of data in two different messages, the current system may not work. The Bitcoin protocol does not require that all messages have a fixed number of fields per version. What is being argued for here is 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. That seems like a minor but very reasonable request, and it's trivial to do.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T19:11:35.415354+00:00