Author: Michael Folkson 2022-10-02 15:25:19
Published on: 2022-10-02T15:25:19+00:00
The email exchange between Michael Folkson and Anthony Towns via the bitcoin-dev mailing list discusses the activation of proposed consensus changes on signet, which is a Bitcoin test network. The benefit of doing so on signet, which is outside of core, is that there is no need for community consensus on soft forks. Signet sBTC isn't money, and it isn't permissionless, so there are fewer risks compared to mainnet. However, signet mining has a closed set determined by the first block after genesis when the signetchallenge is locked in, which means that signet soft forks always have gatekeepers.Michael expresses concern about the pressure faced by gatekeepers to merge unfinished or buggy soft fork proposals on the default signet, which may disrupt all default signet users. He suggests that running regtest or a private signet may be a better option for those who do not want to risk any disruption, as global P2P networks always have some level of risk of disruption. The more soft fork proposals that are enabled on the default signet, the higher the risk of a stalling blockchain, although the small number of block signers should prevent users from being forked off entirely onto a different default signet chain.Michael also compares the consensus changes on bitcoin-inquisition to the linux-next tree in the Linux ecosystem. The bar for default signet soft fork activations will be lower than mainnet, but these proposals still require community consensus to minimize the risk of mainnet chain splits. There are no block signers or regularly updated checkpoints on mainnet, so it is possible that soft fork proposals activated on the default signet may never get activated on mainnet.Anthony Towns then provides updates on the CTV and APO support, including a previously unknown bug in the CTV PR against core. He has also mined a couple of test APO transactions and demonstrates the case where a third party can replay APO signatures to send funds from duplicate UTXOs to fees by spending those UTXOs in a single tx.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T00:17:37.225887+00:00