Author: Mark Friedenbach 2015-10-15 18:31:17
Published on: 2015-10-15T18:31:17+00:00
The Bitcoin blockchain may not need to lower the interblock interval due to network latency, and it would be preferable for sidechains such as Liquid to have shorter intervals without resorting to complex bit shifting. One alternative is to move the flag bit indicating use of seconds to bit 23 and reserve bits 17-22 to provide higher granularity in a sidechain environment. Another alternative is to put the units flag in the least significant bit, which allows both units of lock-time to make use of 1-2 byte pushes but makes lock times of 64-127 2-bytes instead of 1-byte. Adam Back proposed that if security arguments for limitations on IBLT or fountain codes are found, orphan rates can remain low in a decentralized way with 1min blocks. The locktime granularity would be coarse relative to the block interval (with 512s locktime granularity). BIP68 now explicitly uses 16 bits with a bitmask and 512s granularity within the context of the 10 minute block target, leaving aside 14 bits for further soft forks within the semantics of BIP68.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T23:46:31.271349+00:00