Author: Jorge Timón 2014-03-22 13:53:41
Published on: 2014-03-22T13:53:41+00:00
Peter Todd, a blockchain technology expert, wrote in an email on March 22, 2014, that there has been a lot of recent hoopla over proof-of-publication and OP_RETURN length getting reduced to a rather useless 40 bytes at the last minute prior to the 0.9 release. He expressed his concern about miners accepting transactions that have longer data than whatever is specified as standard by the reference implementation. Todd argued that non-validated proof of publication will be very expensive in the long run since they will have to compete with transactions that actually use the utxo, a feature that is more valuable. However, he opposed any limitation on OP_RETURN at the protocol level other than the block size limit itself and wouldn't mind if they're removed from isStandard. Todd opined that maybe this encourages miners to adopt their policies, which could be good for things like replace-by-fee, the rational policy for miners, which he strongly supports. He suggested that different and configurable mining policies should be implemented to keep improving modularity. Todd also noted that all these methods have some overhead compared to just using OP_RETURN and thus cost more. He thought the consensus was that op_return was the right way to put non-validated data in the chain, but limiting it in standard policies doesn't seem consistent with that.Todd concluded by saying that he would be writing something more detailed soon about why proof-of-publication is essential and miners would be smart to support it. He argued that if you need proof-of-publication for what your system does, you're much more secure if you're embedded within Bitcoin rather than alongside it. Todd suggested that we've got a real-world example of the former with Twister, among many others, usually resulting in a switch to a centralized checkpointing scheme. He advised people against using separate PoW blockchain or a merge-mined one and suggested that going the embedded route may have a censorship risk, but at least we know that for the foreseeable future doing so will require explicit blacklists. Todd's argument is that the "proof of publication vs separate chain" discussion is orthogonal to the "merged mining vs independent chain" one.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T15:31:39.336483+00:00