Author: Gregory Maxwell 2012-03-01 14:27:53
Published on: 2012-03-01T14:27:53+00:00
Ben Reeves raised a concern about the vulnerability of patched clients to blockchain corruption despite the implementation in the reference patch fixing the forking issue. This is because spent coinbases are still allowed to be disconnected. Although this is not an immediate issue, it could cause problems for new clients during the initial blockchain download as LoadBlockIndex() would error on restart. When asked if there was a reason not to disallow duplicate coinbases entirely, the response was that doing so would make it impossible for nodes to prune the values. They would have to keep a set of all the coinbase hashes forever in order to perform the test. The height-in-coinbase BIP would make duplicates effectively impossible to create, which is a much cleaner behavior.
Updated on: 2023-05-18T23:07:38.272874+00:00