Author: Justus Ranvier 2015-11-02 22:12:29
Published on: 2015-11-02T22:12:29+00:00
On 2nd November 2015, Gavin Andresen shared his opinion on the guidelines provided for Bitcoin. He agreed with the guidelines but pointed out that there could be arguments over what constitutes "reasonable notice" and what fits under "protects the integrity of the network". If Bitcoin were perfect, any transaction that was valid at the time it was signed would always remain valid until spent regardless of any protocol changes which occurred in the interim. This property would give Bitcoin maximum possible utility compared to alternative properties. However, there are some pathological cases where this guarantee cannot be met, and it is not possible to know if these cases are a real problem in practice due to the possible existence of unbroadcast transactions which would trigger them.A possible strategy to tackle these issues is to implement as much non-pathological backward compatibility as possible and treat unhandled cases as outstanding bugs whose resolution is deferred unless and until they are actually triggered.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T00:47:06.712435+00:00