Author: Telephone Lemien 2015-05-27 08:04:09
Published on: 2015-05-27T08:04:09+00:00
In an email thread on the Bitcoin-development mailing list, Mark Friedenbach discussed the original intention of sequence numbers as a mechanism for transaction replacement in multi-party transaction construction, such as micropayment channels. He explained that relay nodes perform transaction replacement according to some policy rule using sequence numbers, which can be defeated by miners choosing not to follow that policy. To fix this issue, sequence numbers can be given new consensus-enforced semantics as a relative lock-time. This enables the implementation of a bidirectional micropayment channel and the relative-form of CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY. An example implementation of this concept is available on Github as a policy change to the mempool processing of Bitcoin Core.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T21:38:28.554244+00:00