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From: Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@bitpay.com>
Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2014 23:11:52 +0100
Message-ID: <CAJHLa0NTj6m4JpHx3+nWtYVV1Zpwf-FaxiyFX9DR821cQYVqsg@mail.gmail.com>
To: Matt Corallo <bitcoin-list@bluematt.me>
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Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] The difficulty of writing consensus
 critical code: the SIGHASH_SINGLE bug
Precedence: list

IMO, CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY should be included in that list, too.

RE soft fork vs. hard fork:  It's about this time at Mike Hearn will
chime in, on the side of hard forks.  Hard forks are in a sense much
cleaner, and permit solving problems not otherwise solvable with a
hard fork.  However, hard forks clearly have risks, notably the Big
Risk akin to a US Constitutional Convention:  once you open the door,
anything can happen, any rule no matter how "sacred" can be changed.

Soft forks are not without their own risks, e.g. reducing some things
to SPV levels of security.

Leaning towards soft fork, but it is a good discussion to have.  A
poorly implemented soft fork may potentially require a hard fork to
fix rollout bugs.


On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 11:05 PM, Matt Corallo <bitcoin-list@bluematt.me> wrote:
> Depends, without BIP62 a /lot/ of the even basic contracts that people
> want to use today (or wanted to use 18 months ago) are unusable, in
> fact, without BIP62, the atomic swaps suggested as important for
> sidechains are not secure. While redoing Bitcoin in a hardfork is nice,
> its a very long-term thing, so I'm not sure about making people wait for
> a large hardfork just to use payment channels.
>
> Also, I echo the difficulty of writing consensus-compatible code and
> highly suggest anyone with money behind an implementation that is doing
> script verification in code that isnt Bitcoin Core rethink that decision.
>
> Matt
>
> On 11/06/14 21:58, Tamas Blummer wrote:
>> Thanks Peter,
>>
>> Having tried to write a bug-for-bug compatible code with Satoshi, I can only second that it is rather close to impossible.
>>
>> The aim of BIP62 is noble, still it does not feel right for me to increase the complexity of the code with e.g. soft-fork-ready versioning.
>> Freezing the consensus code, studying its bugs appears more appropriate to me. What we learn could define a hard fork or a better
>> chain we migrate to as discussed by blockstream.
>>
>> Tamas Blummer
>
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-- 
Jeff Garzik
Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist
BitPay, Inc.      https://bitpay.com/