[bitcoin-dev] cleanstack alt stack & softfork improvements (Was: Merkle branch verification & tail-call semantics for generalized MAST)

[Luke Dashjr <luke@dashjr.org>]

On Tuesday 19 September 2017 12:46:30 AM Mark Friedenbach via bitcoin-dev 
wrote:
> After the main discussion session it was observed that tail-call semantics
> could still be maintained if the alt stack is used for transferring
> arguments to the policy script.

Isn't this a bug in the cleanstack rule?

(Unrelated...)

Another thing that came up during the discussion was the idea of replacing all 
the NOPs and otherwise-unallocated opcodes with a new OP_RETURNTRUE 
implementation, in future versions of Script. This would immediately exit the 
program (perhaps performing some semantic checks on the remainder of the 
Script) with a successful outcome.

This is similar to CVE-2010-5141 in a sense, but since signatures are no 
longer Scripts themselves, it shouldn't be exploitable.

The benefit of this is that it allows softforking in ANY new opcode, not only 
the -VERIFY opcode variants we've been doing. That is, instead of merely 
terminating the Script with a failure, the new opcode can also remove or push 
stack items. This is because old nodes, upon encountering the undefined 
opcode, will always succeed immediately, allowing the new opcode to do 
literally anything from that point onward.

Luke