Re: [Bitcoin-development] Consensus-enforced transaction replacement via sequence numbers

[Telephone Lemien <lemientelephone@gmail.com>]

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2015-05-27 3:50 GMT+02:00 Mark Friedenbach <mark@friedenbach.org>:

> Sequence numbers appear to have been originally intended as a mechanism
> for transaction replacement within the context of multi-party transaction
> construction, e.g. a micropayment channel. The idea is that a participant
> can sign successive versions of a transaction, each time incrementing the
> sequence field by some amount. Relay nodes perform transaction replacement
> according to some policy rule making use of the sequence numbers, e.g.
> requiring sequence numbers in a replacement to be monotonically increasing.
>
> As it happens, this cannot be made safe in the bitcoin protocol as
> deployed today, as there is no enforcement of the rule that miners include
> the most recent transaction in their blocks. As such, any protocol relying
> on a transaction replacement policy can be defeated by miners choosing not
> to follow that policy, which they may even be incentivised to do so (if
> older transactions provide higher fee per byte, for example). Transaction
> replacement is presently disabled in Bitcoin Core.
>
> These shortcomings can be fixed in an elegant way by giving sequence
> numbers new consensus-enforced semantics as a relative lock-time: if a
> sequence number is non-final (MAX_INT), its bitwise inverse is interpreted
> as either a relative height or time delta which is added to the height or
> median time of the block containing the output being spent to form a
> per-input lock-time. The lock-time of each input constructed in this manor,
> plus the nLockTime of the transaction itself if any input is non-final must
> be satisfied for a transaction to be valid.
>
> For example, a transaction with an txin.nSequence set to 0xffffff9b [==
> ~(uint32_t)100] is prevented by consensus rule from being selected for
> inclusion in a block until the 100th block following the one including the
> parent transaction referenced by that input.
>
> In this way one may construct, for example, a bidirectional micropayment
> channel where each change of direction increments sequence numbers to make
> the transaction become valid prior to any of the previously exchanged
> transactions.
>
> This also enables the discussed relative-form of CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY to be
> implemented in the same way: by checking transaction data only and not
> requiring contextual information like the block height or timestamp.
>
> An example implementation of this concept, as a policy change to the
> mempool processing of Bitcoin Core is available on github:
>
> https://github.com/maaku/bitcoin/tree/sequencenumbers
>
>
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