Author: Justus Ranvier 2015-11-02 06:12:16
Published on: 2015-11-02T06:12:16+00:00
In a bitcoin-dev thread, Tier Nolan suggested that giving at least one year's notice would prevent people from losing their money. Later in the same thread, it was pointed out that bitcoin nodes have the capability to validate blocks going back to the genesis block. This means that all the old consensus rules are preserved somewhere in the current code bases of various implementations. There shouldn't be any technical barrier to validating input scripts according to the consensus rules that were in effect at the time of transaction. However, dealing with output may be more difficult. If every consensus rule change had been accompanied by a version number bump, it would have been possible to phase out old versions without invalidating signed-but-unbroadcast transactions.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T00:47:57.442426+00:00