Author: Jared Lee Richardson 2017-03-29 22:17:40
Published on: 2017-03-29T22:17:40+00:00
The Bitcoin Unlimited community has proposed a UTXO check-pointing scheme to reduce the time it takes for new nodes to operate. The proposed idea involves working with miners who have good relationships to include the root hash of the lagging UTXO set in their coinbase transactions and regular transactions from semi-trusted addresses controlled by known people that includes the same root hash in an OP_RETURN output. This will allow cross-checking against the miners' UTXO commitments as part of the initial prototype system. While a new node must differentiate between false history and true one, either approach is better than the current system we have now. However, there are risks involved, such as the software silently attempting to resolve the problem without being foolproof. If an attacker changes the utxo and users follow the main chain until it's too late, there could be a sudden, bizarre, hard-to-debug fork and potentially double spend against those who picked up the fraudulent utxo. There are concerns about the trustworthiness of wallet software, but signed releases could provide the same thing and encourage open-source security checks of the signed utxo's and potentially of users to check download signatures. If the results from this prototype commitment scheme were positive, then perhaps there would be support from the community and miners to enforce a new rule which requires the lagging root hashes to be included in new blocks.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:41:30.118384+00:00