I disagree with a bunch of your points, but I'll wait on others to comment, except I will say that I don't understand what the 20 byte keyhash is. Can you elucidate?
On Tuesday, May 29, 2012 3:05:18 PM Peter Vessenes wrote:Without my got-tired-of-waiting-for-someone-to-merge-it coinbaser branch,
> 1) Germane to the original conversation, anything hard to implement will
> not get implemented by miners.
anything modifying the coinbase is hard to implement.
Rather, I would suggest a 20 byte keyhash, which allows the owner to broadcast
> 2) Coinbase is hard-limited to 100 bytes; this has to include space for
> voting as well as extra nonce, etc. So, I'm not sure that a full URL is a
> good plan.
a full URI out-of-band.
How about a simple prefix to the fixed-size keyhash?
> 1) They shall prepend \mi: to the url to designate it as a url for miner
> info, and append a trailing \ to the url
Perhaps "MFR=" (Mining Fee Rules)
I would recommend miners use https, with a specified SSL keyhash in the URI
> 2) The url given in the coinbase shall have http:// prepended to it before
> processing.
(so we don't need to pay for a "proper" SSL cert).
Clients should simply be required to follow the relevant HTTP specification.
> 3) The destination may be a redirect (to allow short URLs), or may deliver
> content
text/plain and text/html are just wrong and don't make any sense here.
> 4) The content-type returned by the final site post-redirect shall be
> either (preferred text/json) or text/plain or text/html
Bitcoin isn't "the web", it's a complicated script-based cryptocurrency.
> Inre: Luke's complaint about JSON, it is the language of the web. There is
> no easier format for both computers and humans to read, and in this case,
> it includes extensibility, which is nice, since we have no idea how miners
> will wish to divvy up their services; I think one would need to make a
> strong case against JSON for a specific reason to not choose it by default.
Everything in the Bitcoin protocol requires a computer's interpretation for
humans, and there's no reason to stray from this default. Also, JSON is not
extensible in any of the ways needed for this specific purpose.
Last Modified and other caching rules are dealt with in the relevant HTTP
> 4) The text of the document delivered shall be a JSON format dictionary,
> and shall include at minimum the following fields: 'min_fee', 'pool_name',
> and 'last_modified' Optional fields can be determined over time as
> necessary by the mining community
specification...
While it doesn't make sense to give it the full legal force of a contract, I
> 5) The Service Level Agreement isn't binding, but miners who implement it
> are expected to make a best efforts attempt to follow it.
think it should be expressed as a "MUST" in the BIP.
The coinbase advertisement MUST be part of every coinbase mined by the miner,
> Generally a miner would occasionally publish the \mi:\ when they had
> updated their SLA, or just every so often, but the canonical location would
> be the final destination URL from the redirects.
or there's no reliable way to prove which blocks are theirs.