Author: Gregory Maxwell 2016-09-23 18:57:57
Published on: 2016-09-23T18:57:57+00:00
On September 23, 2016, Russell O'Connor expressed concern on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list about a proposal that would destroy the property of Bitcoin to eventually replay transactions during an "innocent" re-org. The proposal in question would eliminate the impact of reorg safety and reduce mempool handling complexity if transactions were required to be locktimed at least 100 blocks after the block they are referencing. This solution could also resolve a severe denial-of-service (DOS) weakness in the spec with the suggestion that nodes would relay this rule without validating it. The depth restriction would allow nodes to relay one or a couple blocks early without creating a situation where someone can consume relay resources with near zero odds of paying a fee for them. However, the proposed scheme has some application issues as this rule would want to be applied at signing time, not as part of a scriptpubkey. It requires two moves when part of a scriptpubkey, which could prove to be an irritation.This scheme was previously proposed for another reason - allowing users to "vote against" long reorgs by ensuring their transactions cannot be included in them. Only 32 bits of the block hash were needed for that particular application.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T23:58:18.186816+00:00