[Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Luke-Jr]

Here's a simple proposal to start discussion from...

BEFORE block 262144:
- Never make a block that, combined with the previous 4 blocks, results in 
over 4500 transaction modifications.
- Reject any block that includes more than 4500 transaction modifications on 
its own (slight soft-fork)
- (these rules should make older clients safe under most circumstances)

FROM block 262144 to block 393216 (hard fork #1):
- Never make, and reject any block that includes more than 24391 transaction 
modifications on its own (this *should* be equivalent to 1 MB)
- (this rules can make older client backports safe unless a reorg is more than 
6 blocks deep)

FROM block 393216 onward (hard fork #2):
- Never make, and reject any block that includes more than 48781 transaction 
modifications on its own (this *should* be equivalent to 2 MB)
- Accept blocks up to 2 MB in data size
- Discontinue support for clients prior to 0.8.1

I intentionally set the block numbers conservatively to try to account for the 
yet-unseen ASIC upgrade.

Thoughts?

Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 5:56 AM, Luke-Jr <luke@dashjr.org> wrote:
> FROM block 262144 to block 393216 (hard fork #1):
> - Never make, and reject any block that includes more than 24391 transaction
> modifications on its own (this *should* be equivalent to 1 MB)
> - (this rules can make older client backports safe unless a reorg is more than
> 6 blocks deep)

I'm not a fan of the two stages, your before block 262144 part sounds
fine to me, though I thought the safe number was closer to 5000.
Perhaps 4911?
The goal here is to pick something which is _absolutely sure_ to be
less than what pre-0.8 accepts (so that its is just a soft fork), but
it need not be needlessly smaller than that.

I think we can accept some small risk of "backport" clients getting
stuck after large reorgs after there has been sufficient upgrade time.
 Performance reasons mean that its very likely no one will be mining
on those nodes by then, and so if they get stuck they'll just need to
manually unstick them. Difficulty is high enough that its unlikely
anything important will remain stuck long enough for a malicious party
to exploit them by mining blocks on the stuck fork.

By allowing that risk you halve the complexity of your change by not
requiring two hard forks.  The 'never make' half of it would probably
be fine.

As far as the size change, that should be a separate process after
we've proven the ability to make a hardforking change with something
low risk/low controversy like this, and only after someone has
actually shown that the software is stable under those conditions lest
we get another issue like we have now where the increase in block
target from 500k/250k to 1MB by a miner exposed inadequate testing.

Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Peter Todd]

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On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 12:56:29PM +0000, Luke-Jr wrote:
> Here's a simple proposal to start discussion from...
> 
> BEFORE block 262144:
> - Never make a block that, combined with the previous 4 blocks, results in 
> over 4500 transaction modifications.
> - Reject any block that includes more than 4500 transaction modifications on 
> its own (slight soft-fork)
> - (these rules should make older clients safe under most circumstances)
> 
> FROM block 262144 to block 393216 (hard fork #1):
> - Never make, and reject any block that includes more than 24391 transaction 
> modifications on its own (this *should* be equivalent to 1 MB)
> - (this rules can make older client backports safe unless a reorg is more than 
> 6 blocks deep)
> 
> FROM block 393216 onward (hard fork #2):
> - Never make, and reject any block that includes more than 48781 transaction 
> modifications on its own (this *should* be equivalent to 2 MB)
> - Accept blocks up to 2 MB in data size

If we're going to consider doing this, at minimum we need to also
include a separate limit for how much the UTXO set can be grown by each
block, calculated as the size of the scriptPubKey + constant metadata.
(tx hash, index #, nValue, nVersion, nHeight should cover it)

A P2SH transaction txout would measure 71bytes under that model. Given
that we haven't even shown we can limit the creation of txouts that can
not be spent economically caution would dictate setting the UTXO growth
limit fairly low, say 1/4th of the block limit.

-- 
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org

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Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 8:05 AM, Peter Todd <pete@petertodd.org> wrote:
> If we're going to consider doing this, at minimum we need to also

I beg people to not derail discussion about fixing things with
discussion of other controversial changes.

Luke-jr, any chance in getting you to revise your proposal to narrow
the scope to things that don't need serious debate?

Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Luke-Jr]

On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 3:18:36 PM Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 8:05 AM, Peter Todd <pete@petertodd.org> wrote:
> > If we're going to consider doing this, at minimum we need to also
> 
> I beg people to not derail discussion about fixing things with
> discussion of other controversial changes.

I figured 2 MB in 2-3 years was fairly uncontroversial.
If not, let's scrap that idea for now.

> Luke-jr, any chance in getting you to revise your proposal to narrow
> the scope to things that don't need serious debate?

It was a one-time "start the conversation" proposal.
I expect what we end up going with may be substantially different.

Luke

Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Peter Todd]

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On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 03:26:14PM +0000, Luke-Jr wrote:
> On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 3:18:36 PM Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 8:05 AM, Peter Todd <pete@petertodd.org> wrote:
> > > If we're going to consider doing this, at minimum we need to also
> > 
> > I beg people to not derail discussion about fixing things with
> > discussion of other controversial changes.
> 
> I figured 2 MB in 2-3 years was fairly uncontroversial.
> If not, let's scrap that idea for now.

The very statement that we're willing to increase the blocksize as our
solution to increased transaction volume rather go down the path of
off-chain transactions is incredibly controversial.

Fuck it, I'll make this public: I've had at least one person who went to
the trouble of finding my personal phone number just so they could leave
a few text messages saying I was going to do serious harm to Bitcoin. At
the same time I've also had a few people asking questions along the line
of had started and/or was considering starting a formal group opposing
the blocksize increase. I even got a significant anonymous donation a
few weeks ago. (rather fittingly this was done by emailing me an
easywallet URL from a throwaway account)

It's not just forum trolls who care about the issue, even if they make
the most noise about it.

-- 
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org

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Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Mark Friedenbach]

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I'm not sure I understand the need for hard forks. We can get through this
crisis by mining pool collusion to prevent forking blocks until there is
widespread adoption of patched clients.

Proposal:

1) Patch the pre-0.8 branches to support an increased lock count, whatever
number is required to make sure that this problem never shows up again at
the current block size (I defer to Luke-Jr and gmaxwell's numbers on this).

2) Patch all branches to not *generate* blocks which trigger the lock count
limit. A larger block would still be accepted as valid, however, if it is
on the longest chain.

3) Simultaneously, provide an additional non-standard patch to mining pool
operators (>>50% network hash) *rejecting* blocks that trigger the lock
count limit. This keeps miners in collusion with each other to stay on a
'compatibility fork'.

4) At some point in the future once we've crossed an acceptable adoption
threshold, the miners remove the above patch in a coordinated way.

Does that not get us past this crisis without a hard-fork?

Mark

(Aside: I'm for BOTH raising the block-size limit and off-chain
transactions, but like it or not there are political sides to that debate
and we should keep politics out of crisis management.)


On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 5:56 AM, Luke-Jr <luke@dashjr.org> wrote:

> Here's a simple proposal to start discussion from...
>
> BEFORE block 262144:
> - Never make a block that, combined with the previous 4 blocks, results in
> over 4500 transaction modifications.
> - Reject any block that includes more than 4500 transaction modifications
> on
> its own (slight soft-fork)
> - (these rules should make older clients safe under most circumstances)
>
> FROM block 262144 to block 393216 (hard fork #1):
> - Never make, and reject any block that includes more than 24391
> transaction
> modifications on its own (this *should* be equivalent to 1 MB)
> - (this rules can make older client backports safe unless a reorg is more
> than
> 6 blocks deep)
>
> FROM block 393216 onward (hard fork #2):
> - Never make, and reject any block that includes more than 48781
> transaction
> modifications on its own (this *should* be equivalent to 2 MB)
> - Accept blocks up to 2 MB in data size
> - Discontinue support for clients prior to 0.8.1
>
> I intentionally set the block numbers conservatively to try to account for
> the
> yet-unseen ASIC upgrade.
>
> Thoughts?
>
>
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Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Pieter Wuille]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 10:41:29AM -0700, Mark Friedenbach wrote:
> 4) At some point in the future once we've crossed an acceptable adoption
> threshold, the miners remove the above patch in a coordinated way.
> 
> Does that not get us past this crisis without a hard-fork?

This is a hardfork: it means some nodes will have to accept blocks they formerly considered invalid.

-- 
Pieter

Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Luke-Jr]

On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 5:41:29 PM you wrote:
> I'm not sure I understand the need for hard forks. We can get through this
> crisis by mining pool collusion to prevent forking blocks until there is
> widespread adoption of patched clients.

Anything requiring widespread adoption of patched clients *is by definition* a 
hard fork.

> Proposal:
> 
> 1) Patch the pre-0.8 branches to support an increased lock count, whatever
> number is required to make sure that this problem never shows up again at
> the current block size (I defer to Luke-Jr and gmaxwell's numbers on this).

This is a hard fork.

The only way to avoid a hard fork is to apply the existing lock limit to all 
clients forever. That would be fine, except that pre-0.8 clients cannot reorg 
N blocks without dividing that limit by (N * 2) + 1; that leaves us with the 
limit of around 1000 locks per block on average. Each transaction uses at 
least 3 locks on average (many times more). So about 300 transactions per 
block. This is a much smaller limit than the 1 MB we've been assuming is the 
bottleneck so far, and the need to increase it is much more urgent - as Pieter 
noted on IRC, we are probably already using more than that even ignoring DP 
spam. The only reason pre-0.8 clients have survived as well as they have thus 
far is because the blockchain has managed to avoid very deep reorgs.

Luke

Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Mark Friedenbach]

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This may be a semantic issue. I meant that it's not a hard-fork of the
bitcoin protocol, which I'm taking to mean the way in which we all
*expected* every version of the Satoshi client to behave: the rules which
we have documented informally on the wiki, this mailing list, and in code
comments, etc. I'm just trying to prevent protocol-creep.

Luke-Jr is suggesting that we add-to/modify the bitcoin protocol rules
which all verifying implementations must adhere to. I'm suggesting that we
instead change the old codebase to do what we expected it to do all along
(what 0.8 does and what every other verifying implementation does), and
through miner collusion buy ourselves enough time for people to update
their own installations.

I know there's people here who will jump in saying that the bitcoin
protocol is the behavior of the Satoshi client, period. But which Satoshi
client? 0.7 or 0.8? How do you resolve that without being arbitrary? And
regardless, we are moving very quickly towards a multi-client future. This
problem is very clearly a *bug* in the old codebase. So let's be forward
thinking and do what we would do in any other situation: fix the bug,
responsibly notify people and give them time to react, then move on. Let's
not codify the bug in the protocol.

Mark



On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 10:58 AM, Pieter Wuille <pieter.wuille@gmail.com>wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 10:41:29AM -0700, Mark Friedenbach wrote:
> > 4) At some point in the future once we've crossed an acceptable adoption
> > threshold, the miners remove the above patch in a coordinated way.
> >
> > Does that not get us past this crisis without a hard-fork?
>
> This is a hardfork: it means some nodes will have to accept blocks they
> formerly considered invalid.
>
> --
> Pieter
>

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Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[slush]

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Agree. I quite like Mark's proposal. Yes, formally it is hard fork. But the
step 4) can come very far in the future, when the penetration of <0.8
clients will be mininimal.

slush

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 7:27 PM, Mark Friedenbach <mark@monetize.io> wrote:

> This problem is very clearly a *bug* in the old codebase. So let's be
> forward thinking and do what we would do in any other situation: fix the
> bug, responsibly notify people and give them time to react, then move on.
> Let's not codify the bug in the protocol.
>

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Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Pieter Wuille]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 11:27:13AM -0700, Mark Friedenbach wrote:
> I know there's people here who will jump in saying that the bitcoin
> protocol is the behavior of the Satoshi client, period. But which Satoshi
> client? 0.7 or 0.8?

The protocol is whatever the network enforces - and that is some mix of versions of the
reference client right now, but doesn't need to remain that way.

I would very much like to have a text book of rules that is authorative, and every client
that follows it would be correct. Unfortunately, that is not how a consensus system works.
All (full) clients validate all rules, and all must independently come to the same
solution. Consensus is of utmost importance, more than some theoretical "correctness".
If we'd have a specification document, and it was discovered that a lot of
nodes on the network were doing something different than the document, those nodes would
be buggy, but it would be the specification that is wrong.

That is what happened: 0.7 and before had a bug, but 0.8 was wrong for not following the
rules of the network (which I hate to say, as I'm responsible for many changes in 0.8).

As said in another thread, the problem in the old versions needs fixing (this would even
be the case if no 0.8 existed at all, and no fork risk existed at all). But let's please
do it in a way we can all agree about, in a controlled fashion.

-- 
Pieter

Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 11:27 AM, Mark Friedenbach <mark@monetize.io> wrote:
> This may be a semantic issue. I meant that it's not a hard-fork of the
> bitcoin protocol, which I'm taking to mean the way in which we all
> *expected* every version of the Satoshi client to behave: the rules which we

In our common language a hardfork is a rule difference that can cause
irreconcilable failure in consensus; it's not some political change or
some change in the user's understanding or something fuzzy like that.
Please don't creep the definitions... but arguments over definitions
are silly.  If you really object to calling the causes consensus
failure thing something else okay, then suggest a name, but whatever
its called thats what we're talking about here.

Your proposal of having a hardfork but only on the mining nodes has
coordination problems. What happens if we don't know how to contact a
majority of the hashpower to get them to turn off their special
validation code?  This is especially a concern because it's not
unlikely that in a few months there may be solo miners with tens of
TH/s... already we have a single party with nearly a majority, though
at the moment they happen to be mining on the largest couple pools.

Far better to have this special code just triggered on a deadline,
which can be widely advertised as "you must upgrade to 0.7.4 or >0.8.1
before this time" and then all switch at once... and then we
demonstrate the viability of a general mechanism that doesn't depend
on poor miner decentralization.

Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Luke-Jr]

On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 6:27:13 PM Mark Friedenbach wrote:
> Luke-Jr is suggesting that we add-to/modify the bitcoin protocol rules
> which all verifying implementations must adhere to. I'm suggesting that we
> instead change the old codebase to do what we expected it to do all along
> (what 0.8 does and what every other verifying implementation does), and
> through miner collusion buy ourselves enough time for people to update
> their own installations.

Curiously enough, at least MtGox's custom implementation stuck with the 
canonical blockchain despite 0.8's accidental rule change.

> I know there's people here who will jump in saying that the bitcoin
> protocol is the behavior of the Satoshi client, period. But which Satoshi
> client? 0.7 or 0.8? How do you resolve that without being arbitrary? And
> regardless, we are moving very quickly towards a multi-client future. This
> problem is very clearly a *bug* in the old codebase. So let's be forward
> thinking and do what we would do in any other situation: fix the bug,
> responsibly notify people and give them time to react, then move on. Let's
> not codify the bug in the protocol.

No, if any other client released diverged from the consensus of all 
past/existing clients, we would do the same thing: call it a formerly unknown 
protocol rule, that this new client has a bug implementing, and be done with 
it.

The only reason this particular issue needs special treatment is because the 
implications of the new rule mean that we're up against a hard limit in the 
protocol today rather than 2 years from now.

Luke

Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 1:10 PM, Matthew Mitchell
<matthewmitchell@thelibertyportal.com> wrote:
> Why would it be a difficulty in getting people to update away from 0.7 and earlier? How long would that roughly take? If people are hesitant to update, imagine if a more serious vulnerability is found. It could be disastrous.

The development community backports critical fixes which makes
updating instead of upgrading possible, but that still is not free.
Many people are carrying patches against Bitcoin which require
integration and time for testing— even if its just an update. Small
behavior changes can still break things for the users. For example, a
major mining pool lost well over 1000 BTC when upgrading to 0.8
because the reindex interacted poorly with their pool server software
and caused them to pay people 25 BTC per share, an update or upgrade
is just a risky even whos risk can be minimized if its done at your
own pace.

Sometimes when there is a vulnerability what people will do is isolate
their production nodes from the internet using upgraded nodes, so they
avoid touching the production systems. Other times the vulnerability
is only a DOS attack so they ignore it unless the attack happens, or
only applies to something else they don't care about.

Another point is that if everyone instantly upgrades in response to
developers claim that an urgent is needed (as opposed to implementing
other workarounds) then the security of the system much more obviously
reduces to the ability to compromise a developer— something no one
should want. When roll outs take time there is more time for review to
catch things, fewer nodes harmed by an introduced flaw, etc.

Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Andy Parkins]

On Wednesday 13 Mar 2013 12:56:29 Luke-Jr wrote:
> Here's a simple proposal to start discussion from...

It seems to me that the biggest failure was not the development of two 
chains, but the assurance to users (by the client) that their transactions 
were confirmed.

Is it possible to change the definition of "6 confirmations" so that it's 
something like: "six confirmations clear of any other chain".  While there 
are two competing chains, it's possible that one will go pop at any moment.  
That makes the confirmation count of any transaction on one of those chains, 
zero.

It doesn't seem impossible that clients could be made far more permissive 
about acknowledging the existence of blockchains that they wouldn't 
necessarily accept themselves (if the proof of work was valid) and warning 
the users that it's going on.



Andy

-- 
Dr Andy Parkins
andyparkins@gmail.com

Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Luke-Jr]

On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 9:06:44 PM Andy Parkins wrote:
> On Wednesday 13 Mar 2013 12:56:29 Luke-Jr wrote:
> > Here's a simple proposal to start discussion from...
> 
> It seems to me that the biggest failure was not the development of two
> chains, but the assurance to users (by the client) that their transactions
> were confirmed.

These are both the same thing.

Luke

Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Roy Badami]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 09:14:03PM +0000, Luke-Jr wrote:
> On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 9:06:44 PM Andy Parkins wrote:
> > On Wednesday 13 Mar 2013 12:56:29 Luke-Jr wrote:
> > > Here's a simple proposal to start discussion from...
> > 
> > It seems to me that the biggest failure was not the development of two
> > chains, but the assurance to users (by the client) that their transactions
> > were confirmed.
> 
> These are both the same thing.

The idea of the client detecting/warning about not-trivial forking
seems worthwhile too, though, assuming it doesn't already (AIUI it
doesn't).

I don't know if there's any automatic monitoring for forks, but if not
I would assume that the core devs and/or Bitcoin Foundation would be
planning to put some in place.  But there's no reason I can see why
end users clients should't be warning of such situations, too, when
they can (obviously they won't always be aware of the fork).

roy

Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 2:22 PM, Roy Badami <roy@gnomon.org.uk> wrote:
> The idea of the client detecting/warning about not-trivial forking
> seems worthwhile too, though, assuming it doesn't already (AIUI it
> doesn't).

It does warn— if its heard the fork and its on the lower difficulty
side. Extending that to also alert if its on the winning side and the
fork is long enough might be wise, though I have a little concern that
it'll be mistaken to be more dependable than it would be.

Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Roy Badami]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 02:27:01PM -0700, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 2:22 PM, Roy Badami <roy@gnomon.org.uk> wrote:
> > The idea of the client detecting/warning about not-trivial forking
> > seems worthwhile too, though, assuming it doesn't already (AIUI it
> > doesn't).
> 
> It does warn??? if its heard the fork and its on the lower difficulty
> side. Extending that to also alert if its on the winning side and the
> fork is long enough might be wise, though I have a little concern that
> it'll be mistaken to be more dependable than it would be.

Still, it would have meant that all 0.8 users would have immediatley
been told that something was wrong.  I don't know to what extent it
was luck that this was dealt with as promptly and efficiently as it
was, but to the extent that luck was involved, a slew of 0.8 users
shouting in various places "wtf is going on" couldn't but help in
reducing the element of luck if something similar were to happen again.

roy

Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Cameron Garnham]

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Hash: SHA256


I think that the course of action is quite simple:

1.  Upgrade all the clients to implement the lock limits. (in code,
not at the DB exception layer).  A bit of research is needed to work
out exactly what these limits are so we can maximise the number of
transactions.

2. Fix the DB layer, and test that all the clients can support 1MB blocks.

3. Once we are confident that the network supports 1MB blocks, set a
date where the lock limits are removed.

For me, everyone signed up to bitcoin thinking that there was a 1MB /
block limit.  The lock limits were unexpected, and could be considered
extremely uncontroversial to remove.

The discussion of larger blocks (i.e. > 1MB ),  that I happen to
disagree with,  is not relevant to the discussion of the removal of
the lock limits.


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Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Benjamin Lindner]

On Mar 13, 2013, at 8:18 PM, Cameron Garnham <da2ce7@gmail.com> wrote:
> For me, everyone signed up to bitcoin thinking that there was a 1MB /
> block limit.  The lock limits were unexpected, and could be considered
> extremely uncontroversial to remove.

This. Software behavior which is not described by the source code should not be considered an integral part of the rule set.
Any influence of external libraries on the consensus mechanism is unacceptable.

Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Luke-Jr]

On Friday, March 15, 2013 5:06:20 PM Benjamin Lindner wrote:
> On Mar 13, 2013, at 8:18 PM, Cameron Garnham <da2ce7@gmail.com> wrote:
> > For me, everyone signed up to bitcoin thinking that there was a 1MB /
> > block limit.  The lock limits were unexpected, and could be considered
> > extremely uncontroversial to remove.
> 
> This. Software behavior which is not described by the source code should
> not be considered an integral part of the rule set. Any influence of
> external libraries on the consensus mechanism is unacceptable.

Note that the lock limits were explicitly set in the bitcoind source code.

Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Benjamin Lindner <ben@benlabs.net> wrote:
> This. Software behavior which is not described by the source code should not be considered an integral part of the rule set.
> Any influence of external libraries on the consensus mechanism is unacceptable.

No one thinks its controversial to remove it or that it's a good thing
to have— only that its technically somewhat complicated and risky to
remove it.