Merkle branch verification & tail-call semantics for generalized MAST



Summary:

Luke Dashjr, a Bitcoin Core developer, raised concerns about the safety of a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) for tail-call execution semantics, which doesn't count sigops toward the block sigop limit. He questioned if it was safe and how long it would take to verify a malicious block with nearly 4MB of sigops only. He acknowledged the difficulty in supporting the sigop limit and suggested reducing the time needed to verify such blocks by including a new per input rule that reduces it to ~1s without cutting off any non-attack script. Dashjr also noted that secp256k1 is now fast enough that there is no need for a separate sigop limit. The BIP proposal and code are available on GitHub.


Updated on: 2023-06-12T18:20:05.222813+00:00