Author: Mike Hearn 2015-05-27 10:11:26
Published on: 2015-05-27T10:11:26+00:00
The sequence numbers in Bitcoin were originally intended for transaction replacement within the context of multi-party transaction construction, such as a micropayment channel. However, these cannot be made safe in the Bitcoin protocol as there is no enforcement of the rule that miners include the most recent transaction in their blocks. Despite this, the original replace-by-fee argument uses the same logic. The proposed protocols by Satoshi are still considered the most powerful, and any change to the semantics on nSequence should be gated by a high bit or something so that the original meaning remains available if/when resource scheduling and update flood damping are implemented. This way, people can try it out and decide whether to proceed based on whether miners are breaking things too frequently by ignoring the chronological ordering.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T21:38:36.520937+00:00