Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2016 17:49:57 -0400
From: Peter Todd <pete@petertodd.org>
To: Pieter Wuille <pieter.wuille@gmail.com>,
	Bitcoin Protocol Discussion <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>
Message-ID: <20161016214957.GA16291@fedora-21-dvm>
References: <CAPg+sBjdyJ297-GZvVc-wQwCEX-cRAGTNWDd92SgVzdCcD_ZMw@mail.gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Start time for BIP141 (segwit)
Precedence: list


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On Sun, Oct 16, 2016 at 04:31:55PM +0200, Pieter Wuille via bitcoin-dev wro=
te:
> Hello all,
>=20
> We're getting ready for Bitcoin Core's 0.13.1 release - the first one
> to include segregated witness (BIP 141, 143, 144, 145) for Bitcoin
> mainnet, after being extensively tested on testnet and in other
> software. Following the BIP9 recommendation [1] to set the versionbits
> start time a month in the future and discussion in the last IRC
> meeting [2], I propose we set BIP 141's start time to November 15,
> 2016, 0:00 UTC (unix time 1479168000).

Speaking as maintainer of python-bitcoinlib, ACK.

Currently python-bitcoinlib doesn't have any support for segwit, although B=
ob
McElrath has had a pull-req open for it since July:

    https://github.com/petertodd/python-bitcoinlib/pull/112

I may or may not get time to finishing reviewing and merging that pull-req
before segwit activates - I've been a rather distracted maintainer. But eit=
her
way, as has been explained elsewhere ad nauseam, segwit is backwards compat=
ible
with existing nodes and wallets so there's no rush to upgrade.

For example, another project of mine - OpenTimestamps - also makes use of
python-bitcoinlib for the relatively complex and hairy low-level code that
extracts timestamp proofs from blocks, among other things. In fact, in the
development of OpenTimestamps I had to fix a few minor bugs in
python-bitcoinlib, because it exercised parts of the codebase that few other
projects do.

Yet the impact on segwit for OpenTimestamps will be zero - since segwit is a
softfork it's 100% backwards compatible with existing software. Of course, =
at
some point in the future I'll probably get around to adding segwit support =
to
the software to reduce transaction fees, but there's no rush to do so. All =
I'll
be doing for segwit in the near future is upgrading the full nodes on the t=
wo
redundant OpenTimestamps calendar servers to v0.13.1, and even there I'll be
able to stagger the upgrades to protect against the unlikely occurance of
v0.13.1 having a bug that v0.13.0 doesn't. Again, staggering full-node upgr=
ades
is only possible because segwit is a soft-fork.

--=20
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org

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