Re: [bitcoin-dev] Extension block proposal by Jeffrey et al

Re: [bitcoin-dev] Extension block proposal by Jeffrey et al

[Luke Dashjr]

Recently there has been some discussion of an apparent work-in-progress 
extension block proposal by Christopher Jeffrey, Joseph Poon, Fedor Indutny, 
and Steven Pair. Since this hasn't been formally posted on the ML yet, perhaps 
it is still in pre-draft stages and not quite ready for review, but in light 
of public interest, I think it is appropriate to open it to discussion, and 
toward this end, I have reviewed the current revision.

For reference, the WIP proposal itself is here:
    https://github.com/tothemoon-org/extension-blocks

==Overall analysis & comparison==

This is a relatively complicated proposal, creating a lot of additional 
technical debt and complexity in comparison to both BIP 141 and hardforks. It 
offers no actual benefits beyond BIP 141 or hardforks, so seems irrational to 
consider at face value. In fact, it fits much better the inaccurate criticisms 
made by segwit detractors against BIP 141.

That being said, this proposal is very interesting in construction and is for 
the most part technically sound. While ill-fit to merely making blocks larger, 
it may be an ideal fit for fundamentally different block designs such as 
Rootstock and MimbleWimble in absence of decentralised non-integrated 
sidechains (extension blocks are fundamentally sidechains tied into Bitcoin 
directly).

==Fundamental problem==

Extension blocks are a risk of creating two classes of "full nodes": those 
which verify the full block (and are therefore truly full nodes), and those 
which only verify the "base" block. However, because the extension is 
consensus-critical, the latter are in fact not full nodes at all, and are left 
insecure like pseudo-SPV (not even real SPV) nodes. This technical nature is 
of course true of a softfork as well, but softforks are intentionally designed 
such that all nodes are capable of trivially upgrading, and there is no 
expectation for anyone to run with pre-softfork rules.

In general, hardforks can provide the same benefits of an extension block, but 
without the false expectation and pointless complexity.

==Other problems & questions==

> These outpoints may not be spent inside the mempool (they must be redeemed 
from the next resolution txid in reality).

This breaks the ability to spend unconfirmed funds in the same block (as is 
required for CPFP).

The extension block's transaction count is not cryptographically committed-to 
anywhere. (This is an outstanding bug in Bitcoin today, but impractical to 
exploit in practice; however, exploiting it in an extension block may not be 
as impractical, and it should be fixed given the opportunity.)

> The merkle root is to be calculated as a merkle tree with all extension 
block txids and wtxids as the leaves.

This needs to elaborate how the merkle tree is constructed. Are all the txids 
followed by all the wtxids (tx hashes)? Are they alternated? Are txid and 
wtxid trees built independently and merged at the tip?

> Output script code aside from witness programs, p2pkh or p2sh is considered 
invalid in extension blocks.

Why? This prevents extblock users from sending to bare multisig or other 
various possible destinations. (While static address forms do not exist for 
other types, they can all be used by the payment protocol.)

Additionally, this forbids datacarrier (OP_RETURN), and forces spam to create 
unprovably-unspendable UTXOs. Is that intentional?

> The maximum extension size should be intentionally high.

This has the same "attacks can do more damage than ordinary benefit" issue as 
BIP141, but even more extreme since it is planned to be used for future size 
increases.

> Witness key hash v0 shall be worth 1 point, multiplied by a factor of 8.

What is a "point"? What does it mean multiplied by a factor of 8? Why not just 
say "8 points"?

> Witness script hash v0 shall be worth the number of accurately counted 
sigops in the redeem script, multiplied by a factor of 8.

Please define "accurately counted" here. Is this using BIP16 static counting, 
or accurately counting sigops during execution?

> To reduce the chance of having redeem scripts which simply allow for garbage 
data in the witness vector, every 73 bytes in the serialized witness vector is 
worth 1 additional point.

Is the size rounded up or down? If down, 72-byte scripts will carry 0 
points...)

==Trivial & process==

BIPs must be in MediaWiki format, not Markdown. They should be submitted for 
discussion to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, not social media and news.

> Layer: Consensus (soft-fork)

Extension blocks are more of a hard-fork IMO.

> License: Public Domain

BIPs may not be "public domain" due to non-recognition in some jurisdictions. 
Can you agree on one or more of these? 
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0002.mediawiki#Recommended_licenses

> ## Abstract
> 
> This specification defines a method of increasing bitcoin transaction 
throughput without altering any existing consensus rules.

This is inaccurate. Even softforks alter consensus rules.

> ## Motivation
> 
> Bitcoin retargetting ensures that the time in between mined blocks will be 
roughly 10 minutes. It is not possible to change this rule. There has been 
great debate regarding other ways of increasing transaction throughput, with 
no proposed consensus-layer solutions that have proven themselves to be
particularly safe.

Block time seems entirely unrelated to this spec. Motivation is unclear.

> Extension blocks leverage several features of BIP141, BIP143, and BIP144 for 
transaction opt-in, serialization, verification, and network services, and as 
such, extension block activation entails BIP141 activation.

As stated in the next paragraph, the rules in BIP 141 are fundamentally 
incompatible with this one, so saying BIP 141 is activated is confusingly 
incorrect.

> This specification should be considered an extension and modification to 
these BIPs. Extension blocks are _not_ compatible with BIP141 in its current 
form, and will require a few minor additional rules.

Extension blocks should be compatible with BIP 141, there doesn’t appear to be 
any justification for not making them compatible.

> This specification prescribes a way of fooling non-upgraded nodes into 
believing the existing UTXO set is still behaving as they would expect.

The UTXO set behaves fundamentally different to old nodes with this proposal, 
albeit in a mostly compatible manner.

> Note that canonical blocks containing entering outputs MUST contain an 
extension block commitment (all zeroes if nothing is present in the extension 
block).

Please explain why in Rationale.

> Coinbase outputs MUST NOT contain witness programs, as they cannot be 
sweeped by the resolution transaction due to previously existing consensus 
rules.

Seems like an annoying technical debt. I wonder if it can be avoided.

> The genesis resolution transaction MAY also include a 1-100 byte pushdata in 
the first input script, allowing the miner of the genesis resolution to add a 
special message. The pushdata MUST be castable to a true boolean.

Why? Unlike the coinbase, this seems to create additional technical debt with 
no apparent purpose. Better to just have a consensus rule every input must be 
null.

> The resolution transaction's version MUST be set to the uint32 max (`2^32 - 
1`).

Transaction versions are signed, so I assume this is actually simply -1. 
(While signed transaction versions seemed silly to me, using it for special 
cases like this actually makes sense.)

> ### Exiting the extension block

Should specify that spending such an exit must use the resolution txid, not 
the extblock's txid.

> On the policy layer, transaction fees may be calculated by transaction cost 
as well as additional size/legacy-sigops added to the canonical block due to 
entering or exiting outputs.

BIPs should not specify policy at all. Perhaps prefix "For the avoidance of 
doubt:" to be clear that miners may perform any fee logic they like.

> Transactions within the extended transaction vector MAY include a witness 
vector using BIP141 transaction serialization.

Since extblock transactions are all required to be segwit, why wouldn't this 
be mandatory?

> - BIP141's nested P2SH feature is no longer available, and no longer a 
consensus rule.

Note this makes adoption slower: wallets cannot use the extblock until the 
economy has updated to support segwit-native addresses.

> To reduce the chance of having redeem scripts which simply allow for garbage 
data in the witness vector, every 73 bytes in the serialized witness vector is 
worth 1 additional point.

Please explain why 73 bytes in Rationale.

> This leaves room for 7 future soft-fork upgrades to relax DoS limits.

How so? Please explain.

> A consensus dust threshold is now enforced within the extension block.

Why?

> If the second highest transaction version bit (30th bit) is set to to `1` 
within an extension block transaction, an extra 700-bytes is reserved on the 
transaction space used up in the block.

Why wouldn't users set this on all transactions?

> `default_witness_commitment` has been renamed to 
`default_extension_commitment` and includes the extension block commitment 
script.

`default_witness_commitment` was never part of the GBT spec. At least describe 
what this new key is.

> - Deployment name: `extblk` (appears as `!extblk` in GBT).

Should be just `extblk` if backward compatibility is supported (and `!extblk` 
when not).

> The "deactivation" deployment's start time...

What about timeout? None? To continue the extension block, must it be 
deactivated and reactivated in parallel?

Re: [bitcoin-dev] Extension block proposal by Jeffrey et al

[Johnson Lau]

I feel particularly disappointed that while this BIP is 80% similar to my proposal made 2 months ago ( https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-January/013490.html ), Matt Corallo was only the person replied me. Also, this BIP seems ignored the txid malleability of the resolution tx, as my major technical critique of xblock design.

But anyway, here I’m only making comments on the design. As I said in my earlier post, I consider this more as an academic topic than something really ready for production use.

> This specification defines a method of increasing bitcoin transaction throughput without altering any existing consensus rules.

Softforks by definition tighten consensus rules

> There has been great debate regarding other ways of increasing transaction throughput, with no proposed consensus-layer solutions that have proven themselves to be particularly safe.

so the authors don’t consider segwit as a consensus-layer solution to increase transaction throughput, or not think segwit is safe? But logically speaking if segwit is not safe, this BIP could only be worse. OTOH, segwit also obviously increases tx throughput, although it may not be as much as some people wish to have.

> This specification refines many of Lau's ideas, and offers a much simpler method of tackling the value transfer issue, which, in Lau's proposal, was solved with consensus-layer UTXO selection.

The 2013 one is outdated. As the authors are not quoting it, not sure if they read my January proposal

>  extension block activation entails BIP141 activation.

I think extension block in the proposed form actually breaks BIP141. It may say it activates segregated witness as a general idea, but not a specific proposal like BIP141

> The merkle root is to be calculated as a merkle tree with all extension block txids and wtxids as the leaves.

It needs to be more specific here. How are they exactly arranged? I suggest it uses a root of all txids, and a root of all wtxids, and combine them as the commitment. The reason is to allow people to prune the witness data, yet still able to serve the pruned tx to light wallets. If it makes txid and wtxid as pairs, after witness pruning it still needs to store all the wtxids or it can’t reconstruct the tree

> Outputs signal to exit the extension block if the contained script is either a minimally encoded P2PKH or P2SH script.

This hits the biggest question I asked in my January post: do you want to allow direct exit payment to legacy addresses? As a block reorg will almost guarantee changing txid of the resolution tx, that will permanently invalidate all the child txs based on the resolution tx. This is a significant change to the current tx model. To fix this, you need to make exit outputs unspendable for up to 100 blocks. Doing this, however, will make legacy wallet users very confused as they do not anticipate funding being locked up for a long period of time. So you can’t let the money sent back to a legacy address directly, but sent to a new format address that only recognized by new wallet, which understands the lock up requirement. This way, however, introduces friction and some fungibility issues, and I’d expect people using cross chain atomic swap to exchange bitcoin and xbitcoin

To summarise, my questions are:
1. Is it acceptable to have massive txid malleability and transaction chain invalidation for every natural happening reorg?  Yes: the current spec is ok; No: next question (I’d say no)
2. Is locking up exit outputs the best way to deal with the problem? (I tried really hard to find a better solution but failed)
3. How long the lock-up period should be? Answer could be anywhere from 1 to 100
4. With a lock-up period, should it allow direct exit to legacy address? (I think it’s ok if the lock-up is short, like 1-2 block. But is that safe enough?)
5. Due to the fungibility issues, it may need a new name for the tokens in the ext-block

> Verification of transactions within the extension block shall enforce all currently deployed softforks, along with an extra BIP141-like ruleset.

I suggest to only allow push-only and OP_RETURN scriptPubKey in xblock. Especially, you don’t want to replicate the sighash bug to xblock. Also, requires scriptSig to be always empty

> This leaves room for 7 future soft-fork upgrades to relax DoS limits.

Why 7? There are 16 unused witness program versions

> Witness script hash v0 shall be worth the number of accurately counted sigops in the redeem script, multiplied by a factor of 8.

There is a flaw here: witness script with no sigop will be counted as 0 and have a lot free space

> every 73 bytes in the serialized witness vector is worth 1 additional point.

so 72 bytes is 1 point or 0 point? Maybe it should just scale everything up by 64 or 128, and make 1 witness byte = 1 point . So it won’t provide any “free space” in the block.

> Currently defined witness programs (v0) are each worth 8 points. Unknown witness program outputs are worth 1 point. Any exiting output is always worth 8 points.

I’d suggest to have at least 16 points for each witness v0 output, so it will make it always more expensive to create than spend UTXO. It may even provide extra “discount” if a tx has more input than output. The overall objective is to limit the UTXO growth. The ext block should be mainly for making transactions, not store of value (I’ll explain later)

> Dust Threshold

In general I think it’s ok, but I’d suggest a higher threshold like 5000 satoshi. It may also combine the threshold with the output witness version, so unknown version may have a lower or no threshold. Alternatively, it may start with a high threshold and leave a backdoor softfork to reduce it.

> Deactivation

It is a double-edged sword. While it is good for us to be able to discard an unused chain, it may create really bad user experience and people may even lose money. For example, people may have opened Lightning channels and they will find it not possible to close the channel. So you need to make sure people are not making time-locked tx for years, and require people to refresh their channel regularly. And have big red warning when the deactivation SF is locked in. Generally, xblock with deactivation should never be used as long-term storage of value.

————
some general comments:

1. This BIP in current form is not compatible with BIP141. Since most nodes are already upgraded to BIP141, this BIP must not be activated unless BIP141 failed to activate. However, if the community really endorse the idea of ext block, I see no reason why we couldn’t activate BIP141 first (which could be done in 2 weeks), then work together to make ext block possible. Ext block is more complicated than segwit. If it took dozens of developers a whole year to release segwit, I don’t see how ext block could become ready for production with less time and efforts.

2. Another reason to make this BIP compatible with BIP141 is we also need malleability fix in the main chain. As the xblock has a deactivation mechanism, it can’t be used for longterm value storage.

3. I think the size and cost limit of the xblock should be lower at the beginning, and increases as we find it works smoothly. It could be a predefined growth curve like BIP103, or a backdoor softfork. With the current design, it leaves a massive space for miners to fill up with non-tx garbage. Also, I’d also like to see a complete SPV fraud-proof solution before the size grows bigger.


> On 5 Apr 2017, at 02:03, Luke Dashjr via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> 
> Recently there has been some discussion of an apparent work-in-progress 
> extension block proposal by Christopher Jeffrey, Joseph Poon, Fedor Indutny, 
> and Steven Pair. Since this hasn't been formally posted on the ML yet, perhaps 
> it is still in pre-draft stages and not quite ready for review, but in light 
> of public interest, I think it is appropriate to open it to discussion, and 
> toward this end, I have reviewed the current revision.
> 
> For reference, the WIP proposal itself is here:
>    https://github.com/tothemoon-org/extension-blocks
> 
> ==Overall analysis & comparison==
> 
> This is a relatively complicated proposal, creating a lot of additional 
> technical debt and complexity in comparison to both BIP 141 and hardforks. It 
> offers no actual benefits beyond BIP 141 or hardforks, so seems irrational to 
> consider at face value. In fact, it fits much better the inaccurate criticisms 
> made by segwit detractors against BIP 141.
> 
> That being said, this proposal is very interesting in construction and is for 
> the most part technically sound. While ill-fit to merely making blocks larger, 
> it may be an ideal fit for fundamentally different block designs such as 
> Rootstock and MimbleWimble in absence of decentralised non-integrated 
> sidechains (extension blocks are fundamentally sidechains tied into Bitcoin 
> directly).
> 
> ==Fundamental problem==
> 
> Extension blocks are a risk of creating two classes of "full nodes": those 
> which verify the full block (and are therefore truly full nodes), and those 
> which only verify the "base" block. However, because the extension is 
> consensus-critical, the latter are in fact not full nodes at all, and are left 
> insecure like pseudo-SPV (not even real SPV) nodes. This technical nature is 
> of course true of a softfork as well, but softforks are intentionally designed 
> such that all nodes are capable of trivially upgrading, and there is no 
> expectation for anyone to run with pre-softfork rules.
> 
> In general, hardforks can provide the same benefits of an extension block, but 
> without the false expectation and pointless complexity.
> 
> ==Other problems & questions==
> 
>> These outpoints may not be spent inside the mempool (they must be redeemed 
> from the next resolution txid in reality).
> 
> This breaks the ability to spend unconfirmed funds in the same block (as is 
> required for CPFP).
> 
> The extension block's transaction count is not cryptographically committed-to 
> anywhere. (This is an outstanding bug in Bitcoin today, but impractical to 
> exploit in practice; however, exploiting it in an extension block may not be 
> as impractical, and it should be fixed given the opportunity.)
> 
>> The merkle root is to be calculated as a merkle tree with all extension 
> block txids and wtxids as the leaves.
> 
> This needs to elaborate how the merkle tree is constructed. Are all the txids 
> followed by all the wtxids (tx hashes)? Are they alternated? Are txid and 
> wtxid trees built independently and merged at the tip?
> 
>> Output script code aside from witness programs, p2pkh or p2sh is considered 
> invalid in extension blocks.
> 
> Why? This prevents extblock users from sending to bare multisig or other 
> various possible destinations. (While static address forms do not exist for 
> other types, they can all be used by the payment protocol.)
> 
> Additionally, this forbids datacarrier (OP_RETURN), and forces spam to create 
> unprovably-unspendable UTXOs. Is that intentional?
> 
>> The maximum extension size should be intentionally high.
> 
> This has the same "attacks can do more damage than ordinary benefit" issue as 
> BIP141, but even more extreme since it is planned to be used for future size 
> increases.
> 
>> Witness key hash v0 shall be worth 1 point, multiplied by a factor of 8.
> 
> What is a "point"? What does it mean multiplied by a factor of 8? Why not just 
> say "8 points"?
> 
>> Witness script hash v0 shall be worth the number of accurately counted 
> sigops in the redeem script, multiplied by a factor of 8.
> 
> Please define "accurately counted" here. Is this using BIP16 static counting, 
> or accurately counting sigops during execution?
> 
>> To reduce the chance of having redeem scripts which simply allow for garbage 
> data in the witness vector, every 73 bytes in the serialized witness vector is 
> worth 1 additional point.
> 
> Is the size rounded up or down? If down, 72-byte scripts will carry 0 
> points...)
> 
> ==Trivial & process==
> 
> BIPs must be in MediaWiki format, not Markdown. They should be submitted for 
> discussion to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, not social media and news.
> 
>> Layer: Consensus (soft-fork)
> 
> Extension blocks are more of a hard-fork IMO.
> 
>> License: Public Domain
> 
> BIPs may not be "public domain" due to non-recognition in some jurisdictions. 
> Can you agree on one or more of these? 
> https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0002.mediawiki#Recommended_licenses
> 
>> ## Abstract
>> 
>> This specification defines a method of increasing bitcoin transaction 
> throughput without altering any existing consensus rules.
> 
> This is inaccurate. Even softforks alter consensus rules.
> 
>> ## Motivation
>> 
>> Bitcoin retargetting ensures that the time in between mined blocks will be 
> roughly 10 minutes. It is not possible to change this rule. There has been 
> great debate regarding other ways of increasing transaction throughput, with 
> no proposed consensus-layer solutions that have proven themselves to be
> particularly safe.
> 
> Block time seems entirely unrelated to this spec. Motivation is unclear.
> 
>> Extension blocks leverage several features of BIP141, BIP143, and BIP144 for 
> transaction opt-in, serialization, verification, and network services, and as 
> such, extension block activation entails BIP141 activation.
> 
> As stated in the next paragraph, the rules in BIP 141 are fundamentally 
> incompatible with this one, so saying BIP 141 is activated is confusingly 
> incorrect.
> 
>> This specification should be considered an extension and modification to 
> these BIPs. Extension blocks are _not_ compatible with BIP141 in its current 
> form, and will require a few minor additional rules.
> 
> Extension blocks should be compatible with BIP 141, there doesn’t appear to be 
> any justification for not making them compatible.
> 
>> This specification prescribes a way of fooling non-upgraded nodes into 
> believing the existing UTXO set is still behaving as they would expect.
> 
> The UTXO set behaves fundamentally different to old nodes with this proposal, 
> albeit in a mostly compatible manner.
> 
>> Note that canonical blocks containing entering outputs MUST contain an 
> extension block commitment (all zeroes if nothing is present in the extension 
> block).
> 
> Please explain why in Rationale.
> 
>> Coinbase outputs MUST NOT contain witness programs, as they cannot be 
> sweeped by the resolution transaction due to previously existing consensus 
> rules.
> 
> Seems like an annoying technical debt. I wonder if it can be avoided.
> 
>> The genesis resolution transaction MAY also include a 1-100 byte pushdata in 
> the first input script, allowing the miner of the genesis resolution to add a 
> special message. The pushdata MUST be castable to a true boolean.
> 
> Why? Unlike the coinbase, this seems to create additional technical debt with 
> no apparent purpose. Better to just have a consensus rule every input must be 
> null.
> 
>> The resolution transaction's version MUST be set to the uint32 max (`2^32 - 
> 1`).
> 
> Transaction versions are signed, so I assume this is actually simply -1. 
> (While signed transaction versions seemed silly to me, using it for special 
> cases like this actually makes sense.)
> 
>> ### Exiting the extension block
> 
> Should specify that spending such an exit must use the resolution txid, not 
> the extblock's txid.
> 
>> On the policy layer, transaction fees may be calculated by transaction cost 
> as well as additional size/legacy-sigops added to the canonical block due to 
> entering or exiting outputs.
> 
> BIPs should not specify policy at all. Perhaps prefix "For the avoidance of 
> doubt:" to be clear that miners may perform any fee logic they like.
> 
>> Transactions within the extended transaction vector MAY include a witness 
> vector using BIP141 transaction serialization.
> 
> Since extblock transactions are all required to be segwit, why wouldn't this 
> be mandatory?
> 
>> - BIP141's nested P2SH feature is no longer available, and no longer a 
> consensus rule.
> 
> Note this makes adoption slower: wallets cannot use the extblock until the 
> economy has updated to support segwit-native addresses.
> 
>> To reduce the chance of having redeem scripts which simply allow for garbage 
> data in the witness vector, every 73 bytes in the serialized witness vector is 
> worth 1 additional point.
> 
> Please explain why 73 bytes in Rationale.
> 
>> This leaves room for 7 future soft-fork upgrades to relax DoS limits.
> 
> How so? Please explain.
> 
>> A consensus dust threshold is now enforced within the extension block.
> 
> Why?
> 
>> If the second highest transaction version bit (30th bit) is set to to `1` 
> within an extension block transaction, an extra 700-bytes is reserved on the 
> transaction space used up in the block.
> 
> Why wouldn't users set this on all transactions?
> 
>> `default_witness_commitment` has been renamed to 
> `default_extension_commitment` and includes the extension block commitment 
> script.
> 
> `default_witness_commitment` was never part of the GBT spec. At least describe 
> what this new key is.
> 
>> - Deployment name: `extblk` (appears as `!extblk` in GBT).
> 
> Should be just `extblk` if backward compatibility is supported (and `!extblk` 
> when not).
> 
>> The "deactivation" deployment's start time...
> 
> What about timeout? None? To continue the extension block, must it be 
> deactivated and reactivated in parallel?
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev

Re: [bitcoin-dev] Extension block proposal by Jeffrey et al

[Olaoluwa Osuntokun]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 37074 bytes --]

Hi Y'all,

Thanks to luke-jr and jl2012 for publishing your analysis of the
xblocks proposal. I'd like to also present some analysis but instead focus
on the professed LN safety enhancing scheme in the proposal. It's a bit
underspecified, so I've taken the liberty of extrapolating a bit to fill
in the gaps to the point that I can analyze it.

TLDR; The xblock proposal includes a sub-proposal for LN which is
essentially a block-size decrease for each open channel within the network.
This decrease reserves space in blocks to allow honest parties guaranteed
space in the blocks to punish dishonest channel counter parties. As a result
the block size is permanently decreased for each channel open. Some may
consider this cost prohibitively high.

>> If the second highest transaction version bit (30th bit) is set to to `1`
>> within an extension block transaction, an extra 700-bytes is reserved on
>> the transaction space used up in the block.

> Why wouldn't users set this on all transactions?

As the proposal stands now, it seems that users _are_ able to unilaterally
use this for all their Bitcoin transactions, as there's no additional cost
to using the smart-contract safety feature outlined in the proposal.

The new safety measures proposed near the end of this xblock proposal
could itself consume a dedicated document outlining the prior background,
context, and implications of this new safety feature. Throughout the rest
of this post, I'll be referring to the scheme as a Pre-Allocated
Smart-contract Dispute arena (PASDA, chosen because it sounds kinda like
"pasta", which brings me many keks). It's rather insufficiently described
and
under specified as it stands in the proposal. As a result, if one doesn't
have the necessary prior context, it might've been skipped over entirely
as it's difficult to extract the sub-proposal from the greater proposal. I
think I possess the necessary prior context required to required to
properly analyze the sub-proposal. As a result, I would like to illuminate
the readers of the ML so y'all may also be able to evaluate this
sub-proposal independently.


## Background

First, some necessary background. Within LN as it exists today there is
one particularly nasty systematic risk related to blockchain availability
in the case of a channel dispute. This risk is clearly outlined in the
original white paper, and in my opinion a satisfactory solution to the
risks which safe guard the use of very high-value channels has yet to be
presented.


### Chain Spam/Censorship Attack Vector

The attack vector mentioned in the original paper is a reoccurring attack
in systems of this nature: DoS attacks. As it stands today, if a channel
counterparty is able to (solely, or in collaboration with other attackers)
prevent one from committing a transaction to the chain, they're able to
steal money from the honest participant in the channel. The attack
proceeds something like this:

   * Mallory opens a very large channel with me.
   * We transfer money back and forth in the channel as normal. The nature
     of these transfers isn't very important. The commitment balances may
     be modified due to Mallory making multi-hop payments through my
     channel, or possibly from Mallory directly purchasing some goods I
     offer, paying via the channel.
   * Let's call the current commitment number state S_i. In the lifetime
     of the channel there may exist some state S_j (i < j) s.t Mallory's
     balance in S_i, is larger than S_j.
   * At this point, depending on the value of the channel's time-based
     security parameter (T) it may be possible for Mallory to broadcast
     state S_i (which has been revoked), and prevent me being able to
     include by my punishment transaction (PTX) within the blockchain.
   * If Mallory is able to incapacitate me for a period of time T, or
     censor my transactions from the chain (either selectively or via a
     spam attack), then at time K (K > T + B, where B is the time the
     commitment transaction was stamped in the chain), then she'll be free
     to walk away with her settled balance at state S_i. For the sake of
     simplicity, we're ignoring HTLC's.
   * Mallory's gain is the difference between the balance at state S_i and
     S_j. Deepening on the gap between the states, my settled balance at
     state S_i and the her balance delta, she may be able to fully recoup
     the funds she initially place in the channel.


### The Role of Channel Reserves as Partial Mitigation

A minor mitigation to this attack that's purely commitment transaction
policy is to mandate that Mallory's balance in the channel never dips
below some reserve value R. Otherwise, if at state S_j, Mallory has a
settled balance of 0 within he channel (all the money if on my side), then
the attack outline above can under certain conditions be _costless_ from
her PoV. Replicate this simultaneously across the network in a synchronized
manner (possibly getting some help from your miner friends) and this
becomes a bit of a problem (to say the least).

Taking this a step further another mitigation that's been proposed is to
also use the channel reserve to implement a _ceiling_ on the maximum size
of _any_ in flight HTLC. Similar to the scheme above, this is meant to
eliminate the possibility of a "costless" attack, as if channel throughput
is artificially constrained, then the value of pending HTLC's isn't
enticing enough to launch a channel breach attack.


### Analysis of Attack Feasibility/Difficulty

The difficulty of the attack is dependant on the time-denominated security
parameter T, and the adversaries ability to collude with miners. Purely
spamming the chain given a very larger T value may be prohibitively
expensive for the attacker and their profit from launching the attack
would need to outweigh the cost in transaction fees and idle bitcoin
required to launch the attack. Considering the case of colluding with
miners, if mining is highly centralized (as it is now), then that may be a
more attractive attack avenue. In a world of highly decentralized mining
(let's say a lofty goal of no pool commanding > 5% of the hash power),
then the attack is much more difficult.

(as an aside schemes that involve transactions committing to the inputs
they're spending and revealing them at a later date/block (committed
transactions) may address the miner censorship attack vector)

Depending one's target use of channels, the individuals they open channels
with, the applications that run on top of the channels, the amount of
coins within the channel, and the choice of the time parameter T, the
attack outline above may or may not be an issue from your PoV.  However,
in order to realize LN's maximum potential of being able to enter a
smart-contract with a complete stranger on the internet trustlessly,
without fearing conditions that may lead to monetary losses, the attack
vector should be mitigated if possible.

In the words of The Architect of the Matrix (and referenced by Tadge at
his "Level of LN" talk at Scaling Bitcoin Hong Kong: "There are levels of
survival we are prepared to accept". There exist levels of LN and usage of
channels, that may not consider this a dire issue.

OK, with the necessary background and context laid out, I'll now analyze
the solution proposed within the greater xblock proposal, making a brief
detour to briefly described another proposed solution.

### Timestop

A prior proposed solution to the failure scenario described above is
what's known as "time stop". This was proposed by gmaxwell and was briefly
touched upon in the original LN white paper. The mechanism of the
time-denominated security parameter T in today's channel construction is
enforced using OpCheckSequenceVerify. After broadcasting a commitment
transaction, all outputs paying to the broadcaster of the commitment are
encumbered with a relative time delay of T blocks, meaning they are unable
to claim the funds until time T has elapsed. This time margin gives the
honest party an opportunity to broadcast their punishment transaction
iff, the broadcaster has broadcast a prior revoked state.

The idea of time stomp is to introduce a special sequence-locks block
height to the system. This block height would increase with each block
along with the regular block height _unless_ the block reaches a certain
sustained "high water mark". As an example, let's assume that when 3
blocks in row are above 75% capacity, then the sequence-lock clock stops
ticking.

The effect of this change is to morph the security risk into simply a
postponement of the judgment within the contract. With this, DoS attacks
simply delay the (seemingly) inevitable punishment of the dishonest party
within the contract.

Aside from some informal discussions and the brief section within the
original white paper, many details of this proposal are left
underspecified. For example: how do miners signal to full nodes that the
sequence-lock clock has stopped? What's the high water mark threshold? Can
it go on indefinitely? Should this feature be opt-in?

I think this proposal should be considered in tandem with the proposal
within the xblock proposal as both have a few unanswered questions that
need to be further explored.

## Pre-Allocated Smart-Contract Dispute Area (PASDA)

Aight, now to the LN enhancing proposal that's buried within the
greater xblock proposal. Introducing some new terminology, I've been
calling this a: Pre-Allocated Smart-contract Dispute Arena or (PASDA) for
short. In a nut shell, the key idea of the proposal is this: transactions
that mark the commencement of a smart contract who's security depends on
availability of block space for disputes are able to _pre allocate_ a
section of the block that will _always_ be _reserved_ for dispute
transactions. With this, contracts is  _guaranteed_ space in blocks to
handle disputes in the case that the contract breaks down. As an analogy:
when you enter in a contract with a contractor to build your dream
kitchen, you _also_ go to a court and reserve a 1-hour block in their
scheduled to handle a dispute _just in case_ one arises. In the event of a
peaceful resolution to the contract, the space is freed up.

The description in the paper is a bit light on the details, so I'll say up
front that I'm extrapolating w.r.t to some mechanisms of the construction.
However, I've been involved in some private conversations where the idea
was thrown around, so I think I have enough context to _maybe_ fill in
some of the gaps in the proposal.

I'll now restate the proposal. Smart contract transactions set a certain
bit in their version number. This bit indicates that they wish to
pre-allocate N bytes in _all_ further blocks _until_ the contract has been
reserved. In the specific context of payment channels, this means that
once a channel is open, until it has been closed, it _decreases_ the
available block size for all other transactions. As this is a very
aggressive proposal I think the authors took advantage of the new design
space within xblocks to include something that may not be readily accepted
as a modification to the rules of the main chain.

The concrete parameters chosen in the proposal are: each channel opening
transaction reserves 700-bytes within _each_ block in the chain until the
transaction has been closed. This pre-allocation has the following
constraint: a transaction can _only_ take advantage of this allocation iff
it's spending the _first_ output of a smart-contract transaction (has a
particular bit in the version set). This means that only dispute
resolution transactions can utilize this space.

The proposal references two allocations, which I've squinted very hard at
for half a day in an attempt to parse the rules governing them, but so far
I've been unable to glean any further details. From my squinting, I
interpret that half of the allocation is reserved for spending the
self-output of a transaction in the last 2016 blocks (two weeks) and the
other half is dedicated to spending the first output of a commitment
transaction in the _same_ block.

I'm unsure as to why these allocations are separate, and why they aren't
just combined into a single allocation.

### Modification to LN Today

This change would require a slight modification to LN as it's currently
defined today. ATM, we use BIP 69 in order the inputs and outputs of a
transaction. This is helpful as it lets us just send of signatures for new
states as both sides already know the order of the inputs and outputs.
With PASDA, we'd now need to omit the to-self-output (the output in my
commitment transaction paying to myself my settled balance) from this
ordering and _always_ make it the first output (txid:0).

The second change is that this proposal puts a ceiling on on the CSV value
allowed by any channel. All CSV delays _must-weeks otherwise, they're
unable to take advantage of the arena.

### Modifications to Bitcoin

In order to implement this within Bitcoin, a third utxo set (regular
block, xblock) must be maintained by all full nodes. Alternatively, this
can just be a bit in the xblock utxo set. The implementation doesn't
really matter. Before attempting to pack transactions into a block, the
total allocation within the PASDA utxo-set must be summed up, and
subtracted from the block size cap. Only transactions which validly spend
from one of these UTXO's are able to take advantage of the new space in
the block.

## Analysis of PASDA

OK, now for some analysis. First, let's assume that transactions which
create PASDA UTXO's aren't subject to any additional constraints. If so,
then this means that _any_ transaction can freely create PASDA UTXO's and
_decrease_ the block size for _all_ transactions until the UTXO has been
spent. If my interpretation is correct, then this introduces a new attack
vector which allows _anyone_ to nearly permanently decrease the block size
for all-time with next to zero additional cost. If this is correct, then
it seems that miners have _zero_ incentive to _ever_ include a transaction
that creates a PASDA output in their blocks as it robs them of future
revenue and decreases the available capacity in the system, possibly
permanently proportionally to _each_ unspent PASDA output in the chain.

Alternatively, let's say the transactions which create PASDA outputs
_must_ pay a disproportionately high fee in order to pay up front for
their consumption of the size within all future blocks. If so, then a
question that arises is: How large a fee? If the fee is very large, then
the utilization of the smart-contract battling arena is only reserved to
very high valued channels who can afford very high fees. This may be
acceptable as if you have a $5 channel, then are you really at risk at
such a large scale attack on Bitcoin just to steal $5 from you? It's
important to note that many attacks on LN's contract resolution
capabilities are also a direct attack on Bitcoin. However, in a world of
dynamic fees, then it may be the case that the fee paid 6 months ago is
now a measly fee an no longer covers the costs to miners (and even the
entire system...).

Finally, here's something I thought of earlier today that possibly
mitigates the downside from the PoV of the miners (everyone else must
still accept the costs of a permanent block size decrease). Let's say that
in order to create a PASDA output fees are paid as normal. However, for
_each_ subsequent block, the participants of the contract _must_ pay a
tribute to miners to account for their loss in revenue due to the
reduction in block size. Essentially, all PASDA outputs must pay _rent_
for their pre-allocated space. If rent isn't paid sufficiently and on-time,
then the pre-allocate arena space is revoked by miners. There're a few
ways to construct this payment, but I'll leave that to follow up work as I
just want to shed some light on the PASDA and its implications.

## Conclusion

I've attempted to fill in some gaps for y'all w.r.t exactly what the
sub-proposal within the greater xblock proposal consists of and some
possible implications. I'd like to note that I've taken the liberty of
filling on some gaps within the sub-proposal as only a single section
within the greater proposal has been allocated to it. PASDA itself could
likely fill up an entirely distinct propsal by itself spanning several
pages. To the authors of the proposal: if my interpretation is inaccurate
please correct me as I'd also like to better understand the proposal. It's
possible that everything I've said in this (now rather long) email is
incorrect.

If you've made it this far, thank you for taking the time out of your day
to consider my thoughts. It's my hope that we can further analyze this
sub-proposal in detail and discuss its construction as well as its
implications on smart-contracts like payment channels on top of Bitcoin.

PASDA purports to address one half of the systematic risks in LN by
possibly eliminating the DoS vector attack against LN. However, the costs
of PASDA are very high, and possibly prohibitively so. In my opinion, the
second attack vector lies in the ability of miners to arbitrarily censor
transactions spending a particular output. Fungibility enhancing
techniques such as Committed Transactions may be a viable path forward to
patch this attack vector.

-- roasbeef


On Tue, Apr 4, 2017 at 8:35 PM Johnson Lau via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> I feel particularly disappointed that while this BIP is 80% similar to my
> proposal made 2 months ago (
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-January/013490.html
> ), Matt Corallo was only the person replied me. Also, this BIP seems
> ignored the txid malleability of the resolution tx, as my major technical
> critique of xblock design.
>
> But anyway, here I’m only making comments on the design. As I said in my
> earlier post, I consider this more as an academic topic than something
> really ready for production use.
>
> > This specification defines a method of increasing bitcoin transaction
> throughput without altering any existing consensus rules.
>
> Softforks by definition tighten consensus rules
>
> > There has been great debate regarding other ways of increasing
> transaction throughput, with no proposed consensus-layer solutions that
> have proven themselves to be particularly safe.
>
> so the authors don’t consider segwit as a consensus-layer solution to
> increase transaction throughput, or not think segwit is safe? But logically
> speaking if segwit is not safe, this BIP could only be worse. OTOH, segwit
> also obviously increases tx throughput, although it may not be as much as
> some people wish to have.
>
> > This specification refines many of Lau's ideas, and offers a much
> simpler method of tackling the value transfer issue, which, in Lau's
> proposal, was solved with consensus-layer UTXO selection.
>
> The 2013 one is outdated. As the authors are not quoting it, not sure if
> they read my January proposal
>
> >  extension block activation entails BIP141 activation.
>
> I think extension block in the proposed form actually breaks BIP141. It
> may say it activates segregated witness as a general idea, but not a
> specific proposal like BIP141
>
> > The merkle root is to be calculated as a merkle tree with all extension
> block txids and wtxids as the leaves.
>
> It needs to be more specific here. How are they exactly arranged? I
> suggest it uses a root of all txids, and a root of all wtxids, and combine
> them as the commitment. The reason is to allow people to prune the witness
> data, yet still able to serve the pruned tx to light wallets. If it makes
> txid and wtxid as pairs, after witness pruning it still needs to store all
> the wtxids or it can’t reconstruct the tree
>
> > Outputs signal to exit the extension block if the contained script is
> either a minimally encoded P2PKH or P2SH script.
>
> This hits the biggest question I asked in my January post: do you want to
> allow direct exit payment to legacy addresses? As a block reorg will almost
> guarantee changing txid of the resolution tx, that will permanently
> invalidate all the child txs based on the resolution tx. This is a
> significant change to the current tx model. To fix this, you need to make
> exit outputs unspendable for up to 100 blocks. Doing this, however, will
> make legacy wallet users very confused as they do not anticipate funding
> being locked up for a long period of time. So you can’t let the money sent
> back to a legacy address directly, but sent to a new format address that
> only recognized by new wallet, which understands the lock up requirement.
> This way, however, introduces friction and some fungibility issues, and I’d
> expect people using cross chain atomic swap to exchange bitcoin and xbitcoin
>
> To summarise, my questions are:
> 1. Is it acceptable to have massive txid malleability and transaction
> chain invalidation for every natural happening reorg?  Yes: the current
> spec is ok; No: next question (I’d say no)
> 2. Is locking up exit outputs the best way to deal with the problem? (I
> tried really hard to find a better solution but failed)
> 3. How long the lock-up period should be? Answer could be anywhere from 1
> to 100
> 4. With a lock-up period, should it allow direct exit to legacy address?
> (I think it’s ok if the lock-up is short, like 1-2 block. But is that safe
> enough?)
> 5. Due to the fungibility issues, it may need a new name for the tokens in
> the ext-block
>
> > Verification of transactions within the extension block shall enforce
> all currently deployed softforks, along with an extra BIP141-like ruleset.
>
> I suggest to only allow push-only and OP_RETURN scriptPubKey in xblock.
> Especially, you don’t want to replicate the sighash bug to xblock. Also,
> requires scriptSig to be always empty
>
> > This leaves room for 7 future soft-fork upgrades to relax DoS limits.
>
> Why 7? There are 16 unused witness program versions
>
> > Witness script hash v0 shall be worth the number of accurately counted
> sigops in the redeem script, multiplied by a factor of 8.
>
> There is a flaw here: witness script with no sigop will be counted as 0
> and have a lot free space
>
> > every 73 bytes in the serialized witness vector is worth 1 additional
> point.
>
> so 72 bytes is 1 point or 0 point? Maybe it should just scale everything
> up by 64 or 128, and make 1 witness byte = 1 point . So it won’t provide
> any “free space” in the block.
>
> > Currently defined witness programs (v0) are each worth 8 points. Unknown
> witness program outputs are worth 1 point. Any exiting output is always
> worth 8 points.
>
> I’d suggest to have at least 16 points for each witness v0 output, so it
> will make it always more expensive to create than spend UTXO. It may even
> provide extra “discount” if a tx has more input than output. The overall
> objective is to limit the UTXO growth. The ext block should be mainly for
> making transactions, not store of value (I’ll explain later)
>
> > Dust Threshold
>
> In general I think it’s ok, but I’d suggest a higher threshold like 5000
> satoshi. It may also combine the threshold with the output witness version,
> so unknown version may have a lower or no threshold. Alternatively, it may
> start with a high threshold and leave a backdoor softfork to reduce it.
>
> > Deactivation
>
> It is a double-edged sword. While it is good for us to be able to discard
> an unused chain, it may create really bad user experience and people may
> even lose money. For example, people may have opened Lightning channels and
> they will find it not possible to close the channel. So you need to make
> sure people are not making time-locked tx for years, and require people to
> refresh their channel regularly. And have big red warning when the
> deactivation SF is locked in. Generally, xblock with deactivation should
> never be used as long-term storage of value.
>
> ————
> some general comments:
>
> 1. This BIP in current form is not compatible with BIP141. Since most
> nodes are already upgraded to BIP141, this BIP must not be activated unless
> BIP141 failed to activate. However, if the community really endorse the
> idea of ext block, I see no reason why we couldn’t activate BIP141 first
> (which could be done in 2 weeks), then work together to make ext block
> possible. Ext block is more complicated than segwit. If it took dozens of
> developers a whole year to release segwit, I don’t see how ext block could
> become ready for production with less time and efforts.
>
> 2. Another reason to make this BIP compatible with BIP141 is we also need
> malleability fix in the main chain. As the xblock has a deactivation
> mechanism, it can’t be used for longterm value storage.
>
> 3. I think the size and cost limit of the xblock should be lower at the
> beginning, and increases as we find it works smoothly. It could be a
> predefined growth curve like BIP103, or a backdoor softfork. With the
> current design, it leaves a massive space for miners to fill up with non-tx
> garbage. Also, I’d also like to see a complete SPV fraud-proof solution
> before the size grows bigger.
>
>
> > On 5 Apr 2017, at 02:03, Luke Dashjr via bitcoin-dev <
> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> >
> > Recently there has been some discussion of an apparent work-in-progress
> > extension block proposal by Christopher Jeffrey, Joseph Poon, Fedor
> Indutny,
> > and Steven Pair. Since this hasn't been formally posted on the ML yet,
> perhaps
> > it is still in pre-draft stages and not quite ready for review, but in
> light
> > of public interest, I think it is appropriate to open it to discussion,
> and
> > toward this end, I have reviewed the current revision.
> >
> > For reference, the WIP proposal itself is here:
> >    https://github.com/tothemoon-org/extension-blocks
> >
> > ==Overall analysis & comparison==
> >
> > This is a relatively complicated proposal, creating a lot of additional
> > technical debt and complexity in comparison to both BIP 141 and
> hardforks. It
> > offers no actual benefits beyond BIP 141 or hardforks, so seems
> irrational to
> > consider at face value. In fact, it fits much better the inaccurate
> criticisms
> > made by segwit detractors against BIP 141.
> >
> > That being said, this proposal is very interesting in construction and
> is for
> > the most part technically sound. While ill-fit to merely making blocks
> larger,
> > it may be an ideal fit for fundamentally different block designs such as
> > Rootstock and MimbleWimble in absence of decentralised non-integrated
> > sidechains (extension blocks are fundamentally sidechains tied into
> Bitcoin
> > directly).
> >
> > ==Fundamental problem==
> >
> > Extension blocks are a risk of creating two classes of "full nodes":
> those
> > which verify the full block (and are therefore truly full nodes), and
> those
> > which only verify the "base" block. However, because the extension is
> > consensus-critical, the latter are in fact not full nodes at all, and
> are left
> > insecure like pseudo-SPV (not even real SPV) nodes. This technical
> nature is
> > of course true of a softfork as well, but softforks are intentionally
> designed
> > such that all nodes are capable of trivially upgrading, and there is no
> > expectation for anyone to run with pre-softfork rules.
> >
> > In general, hardforks can provide the same benefits of an extension
> block, but
> > without the false expectation and pointless complexity.
> >
> > ==Other problems & questions==
> >
> >> These outpoints may not be spent inside the mempool (they must be
> redeemed
> > from the next resolution txid in reality).
> >
> > This breaks the ability to spend unconfirmed funds in the same block (as
> is
> > required for CPFP).
> >
> > The extension block's transaction count is not cryptographically
> committed-to
> > anywhere. (This is an outstanding bug in Bitcoin today, but impractical
> to
> > exploit in practice; however, exploiting it in an extension block may
> not be
> > as impractical, and it should be fixed given the opportunity.)
> >
> >> The merkle root is to be calculated as a merkle tree with all extension
> > block txids and wtxids as the leaves.
> >
> > This needs to elaborate how the merkle tree is constructed. Are all the
> txids
> > followed by all the wtxids (tx hashes)? Are they alternated? Are txid and
> > wtxid trees built independently and merged at the tip?
> >
> >> Output script code aside from witness programs, p2pkh or p2sh is
> considered
> > invalid in extension blocks.
> >
> > Why? This prevents extblock users from sending to bare multisig or other
> > various possible destinations. (While static address forms do not exist
> for
> > other types, they can all be used by the payment protocol.)
> >
> > Additionally, this forbids datacarrier (OP_RETURN), and forces spam to
> create
> > unprovably-unspendable UTXOs. Is that intentional?
> >
> >> The maximum extension size should be intentionally high.
> >
> > This has the same "attacks can do more damage than ordinary benefit"
> issue as
> > BIP141, but even more extreme since it is planned to be used for future
> size
> > increases.
> >
> >> Witness key hash v0 shall be worth 1 point, multiplied by a factor of 8.
> >
> > What is a "point"? What does it mean multiplied by a factor of 8? Why
> not just
> > say "8 points"?
> >
> >> Witness script hash v0 shall be worth the number of accurately counted
> > sigops in the redeem script, multiplied by a factor of 8.
> >
> > Please define "accurately counted" here. Is this using BIP16 static
> counting,
> > or accurately counting sigops during execution?
> >
> >> To reduce the chance of having redeem scripts which simply allow for
> garbage
> > data in the witness vector, every 73 bytes in the serialized witness
> vector is
> > worth 1 additional point.
> >
> > Is the size rounded up or down? If down, 72-byte scripts will carry 0
> > points...)
> >
> > ==Trivial & process==
> >
> > BIPs must be in MediaWiki format, not Markdown. They should be submitted
> for
> > discussion to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, not social media and news.
> >
> >> Layer: Consensus (soft-fork)
> >
> > Extension blocks are more of a hard-fork IMO.
> >
> >> License: Public Domain
> >
> > BIPs may not be "public domain" due to non-recognition in some
> jurisdictions.
> > Can you agree on one or more of these?
> >
> https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0002.mediawiki#Recommended_licenses
> >
> >> ## Abstract
> >>
> >> This specification defines a method of increasing bitcoin transaction
> > throughput without altering any existing consensus rules.
> >
> > This is inaccurate. Even softforks alter consensus rules.
> >
> >> ## Motivation
> >>
> >> Bitcoin retargetting ensures that the time in between mined blocks will
> be
> > roughly 10 minutes. It is not possible to change this rule. There has
> been
> > great debate regarding other ways of increasing transaction throughput,
> with
> > no proposed consensus-layer solutions that have proven themselves to be
> > particularly safe.
> >
> > Block time seems entirely unrelated to this spec. Motivation is unclear.
> >
> >> Extension blocks leverage several features of BIP141, BIP143, and
> BIP144 for
> > transaction opt-in, serialization, verification, and network services,
> and as
> > such, extension block activation entails BIP141 activation.
> >
> > As stated in the next paragraph, the rules in BIP 141 are fundamentally
> > incompatible with this one, so saying BIP 141 is activated is confusingly
> > incorrect.
> >
> >> This specification should be considered an extension and modification to
> > these BIPs. Extension blocks are _not_ compatible with BIP141 in its
> current
> > form, and will require a few minor additional rules.
> >
> > Extension blocks should be compatible with BIP 141, there doesn’t appear
> to be
> > any justification for not making them compatible.
> >
> >> This specification prescribes a way of fooling non-upgraded nodes into
> > believing the existing UTXO set is still behaving as they would expect.
> >
> > The UTXO set behaves fundamentally different to old nodes with this
> proposal,
> > albeit in a mostly compatible manner.
> >
> >> Note that canonical blocks containing entering outputs MUST contain an
> > extension block commitment (all zeroes if nothing is present in the
> extension
> > block).
> >
> > Please explain why in Rationale.
> >
> >> Coinbase outputs MUST NOT contain witness programs, as they cannot be
> > sweeped by the resolution transaction due to previously existing
> consensus
> > rules.
> >
> > Seems like an annoying technical debt. I wonder if it can be avoided.
> >
> >> The genesis resolution transaction MAY also include a 1-100 byte
> pushdata in
> > the first input script, allowing the miner of the genesis resolution to
> add a
> > special message. The pushdata MUST be castable to a true boolean.
> >
> > Why? Unlike the coinbase, this seems to create additional technical debt
> with
> > no apparent purpose. Better to just have a consensus rule every input
> must be
> > null.
> >
> >> The resolution transaction's version MUST be set to the uint32 max
> (`2^32 -
> > 1`).
> >
> > Transaction versions are signed, so I assume this is actually simply -1.
> > (While signed transaction versions seemed silly to me, using it for
> special
> > cases like this actually makes sense.)
> >
> >> ### Exiting the extension block
> >
> > Should specify that spending such an exit must use the resolution txid,
> not
> > the extblock's txid.
> >
> >> On the policy layer, transaction fees may be calculated by transaction
> cost
> > as well as additional size/legacy-sigops added to the canonical block
> due to
> > entering or exiting outputs.
> >
> > BIPs should not specify policy at all. Perhaps prefix "For the avoidance
> of
> > doubt:" to be clear that miners may perform any fee logic they like.
> >
> >> Transactions within the extended transaction vector MAY include a
> witness
> > vector using BIP141 transaction serialization.
> >
> > Since extblock transactions are all required to be segwit, why wouldn't
> this
> > be mandatory?
> >
> >> - BIP141's nested P2SH feature is no longer available, and no longer a
> > consensus rule.
> >
> > Note this makes adoption slower: wallets cannot use the extblock until
> the
> > economy has updated to support segwit-native addresses.
> >
> >> To reduce the chance of having redeem scripts which simply allow for
> garbage
> > data in the witness vector, every 73 bytes in the serialized witness
> vector is
> > worth 1 additional point.
> >
> > Please explain why 73 bytes in Rationale.
> >
> >> This leaves room for 7 future soft-fork upgrades to relax DoS limits.
> >
> > How so? Please explain.
> >
> >> A consensus dust threshold is now enforced within the extension block.
> >
> > Why?
> >
> >> If the second highest transaction version bit (30th bit) is set to to
> `1`
> > within an extension block transaction, an extra 700-bytes is reserved on
> the
> > transaction space used up in the block.
> >
> > Why wouldn't users set this on all transactions?
> >
> >> `default_witness_commitment` has been renamed to
> > `default_extension_commitment` and includes the extension block
> commitment
> > script.
> >
> > `default_witness_commitment` was never part of the GBT spec. At least
> describe
> > what this new key is.
> >
> >> - Deployment name: `extblk` (appears as `!extblk` in GBT).
> >
> > Should be just `extblk` if backward compatibility is supported (and
> `!extblk`
> > when not).
> >
> >> The "deactivation" deployment's start time...
> >
> > What about timeout? None? To continue the extension block, must it be
> > deactivated and reactivated in parallel?
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > bitcoin-dev mailing list
> > bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
> > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>

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Re: [bitcoin-dev] Extension block proposal by Jeffrey et al

[Greg Sanders]

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I'd appreciate the authors chiming in, but I read the PASDA differently:

1) If a transaction is mined with a certain bit set, it reserves 700 bytes
for that particular block.
2) In that space, 2 transactions may happen:
a) First, a transaction penalizing the "parent" transaction for fraud by
spending the funds immediately
b) Second, a "free rider" transaction that penalizes fraud within a ~2 week
window

This means during systematic flooding of closing transactions by
Goldfinger, vigilant watchers of their channels can immediately punish the
fraud in the same block using (a), and if they are unable to, need to find
space within two weeks in (b).

This is really in the LN weeds however, so I'll refrain from evaluating the
efficacy of such a solution.

On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 10:05 AM, Olaoluwa Osuntokun via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> Hi Y'all,
>
> Thanks to luke-jr and jl2012 for publishing your analysis of the
> xblocks proposal. I'd like to also present some analysis but instead focus
> on the professed LN safety enhancing scheme in the proposal. It's a bit
> underspecified, so I've taken the liberty of extrapolating a bit to fill
> in the gaps to the point that I can analyze it.
>
> TLDR; The xblock proposal includes a sub-proposal for LN which is
> essentially a block-size decrease for each open channel within the network.
> This decrease reserves space in blocks to allow honest parties guaranteed
> space in the blocks to punish dishonest channel counter parties. As a
> result
> the block size is permanently decreased for each channel open. Some may
> consider this cost prohibitively high.
>
> >> If the second highest transaction version bit (30th bit) is set to to
> `1`
> >> within an extension block transaction, an extra 700-bytes is reserved on
> >> the transaction space used up in the block.
>
> > Why wouldn't users set this on all transactions?
>
> As the proposal stands now, it seems that users _are_ able to unilaterally
> use this for all their Bitcoin transactions, as there's no additional cost
> to using the smart-contract safety feature outlined in the proposal.
>
> The new safety measures proposed near the end of this xblock proposal
> could itself consume a dedicated document outlining the prior background,
> context, and implications of this new safety feature. Throughout the rest
> of this post, I'll be referring to the scheme as a Pre-Allocated
> Smart-contract Dispute arena (PASDA, chosen because it sounds kinda like
> "pasta", which brings me many keks). It's rather insufficiently described
> and
> under specified as it stands in the proposal. As a result, if one doesn't
> have the necessary prior context, it might've been skipped over entirely
> as it's difficult to extract the sub-proposal from the greater proposal. I
> think I possess the necessary prior context required to required to
> properly analyze the sub-proposal. As a result, I would like to illuminate
> the readers of the ML so y'all may also be able to evaluate this
> sub-proposal independently.
>
>
> ## Background
>
> First, some necessary background. Within LN as it exists today there is
> one particularly nasty systematic risk related to blockchain availability
> in the case of a channel dispute. This risk is clearly outlined in the
> original white paper, and in my opinion a satisfactory solution to the
> risks which safe guard the use of very high-value channels has yet to be
> presented.
>
>
> ### Chain Spam/Censorship Attack Vector
>
> The attack vector mentioned in the original paper is a reoccurring attack
> in systems of this nature: DoS attacks. As it stands today, if a channel
> counterparty is able to (solely, or in collaboration with other attackers)
> prevent one from committing a transaction to the chain, they're able to
> steal money from the honest participant in the channel. The attack
> proceeds something like this:
>
>    * Mallory opens a very large channel with me.
>    * We transfer money back and forth in the channel as normal. The nature
>      of these transfers isn't very important. The commitment balances may
>      be modified due to Mallory making multi-hop payments through my
>      channel, or possibly from Mallory directly purchasing some goods I
>      offer, paying via the channel.
>    * Let's call the current commitment number state S_i. In the lifetime
>      of the channel there may exist some state S_j (i < j) s.t Mallory's
>      balance in S_i, is larger than S_j.
>    * At this point, depending on the value of the channel's time-based
>      security parameter (T) it may be possible for Mallory to broadcast
>      state S_i (which has been revoked), and prevent me being able to
>      include by my punishment transaction (PTX) within the blockchain.
>    * If Mallory is able to incapacitate me for a period of time T, or
>      censor my transactions from the chain (either selectively or via a
>      spam attack), then at time K (K > T + B, where B is the time the
>      commitment transaction was stamped in the chain), then she'll be free
>      to walk away with her settled balance at state S_i. For the sake of
>      simplicity, we're ignoring HTLC's.
>    * Mallory's gain is the difference between the balance at state S_i and
>      S_j. Deepening on the gap between the states, my settled balance at
>      state S_i and the her balance delta, she may be able to fully recoup
>      the funds she initially place in the channel.
>
>
> ### The Role of Channel Reserves as Partial Mitigation
>
> A minor mitigation to this attack that's purely commitment transaction
> policy is to mandate that Mallory's balance in the channel never dips
> below some reserve value R. Otherwise, if at state S_j, Mallory has a
> settled balance of 0 within he channel (all the money if on my side), then
> the attack outline above can under certain conditions be _costless_ from
> her PoV. Replicate this simultaneously across the network in a synchronized
> manner (possibly getting some help from your miner friends) and this
> becomes a bit of a problem (to say the least).
>
> Taking this a step further another mitigation that's been proposed is to
> also use the channel reserve to implement a _ceiling_ on the maximum size
> of _any_ in flight HTLC. Similar to the scheme above, this is meant to
> eliminate the possibility of a "costless" attack, as if channel throughput
> is artificially constrained, then the value of pending HTLC's isn't
> enticing enough to launch a channel breach attack.
>
>
> ### Analysis of Attack Feasibility/Difficulty
>
> The difficulty of the attack is dependant on the time-denominated security
> parameter T, and the adversaries ability to collude with miners. Purely
> spamming the chain given a very larger T value may be prohibitively
> expensive for the attacker and their profit from launching the attack
> would need to outweigh the cost in transaction fees and idle bitcoin
> required to launch the attack. Considering the case of colluding with
> miners, if mining is highly centralized (as it is now), then that may be a
> more attractive attack avenue. In a world of highly decentralized mining
> (let's say a lofty goal of no pool commanding > 5% of the hash power),
> then the attack is much more difficult.
>
> (as an aside schemes that involve transactions committing to the inputs
> they're spending and revealing them at a later date/block (committed
> transactions) may address the miner censorship attack vector)
>
> Depending one's target use of channels, the individuals they open channels
> with, the applications that run on top of the channels, the amount of
> coins within the channel, and the choice of the time parameter T, the
> attack outline above may or may not be an issue from your PoV.  However,
> in order to realize LN's maximum potential of being able to enter a
> smart-contract with a complete stranger on the internet trustlessly,
> without fearing conditions that may lead to monetary losses, the attack
> vector should be mitigated if possible.
>
> In the words of The Architect of the Matrix (and referenced by Tadge at
> his "Level of LN" talk at Scaling Bitcoin Hong Kong: "There are levels of
> survival we are prepared to accept". There exist levels of LN and usage of
> channels, that may not consider this a dire issue.
>
> OK, with the necessary background and context laid out, I'll now analyze
> the solution proposed within the greater xblock proposal, making a brief
> detour to briefly described another proposed solution.
>
> ### Timestop
>
> A prior proposed solution to the failure scenario described above is
> what's known as "time stop". This was proposed by gmaxwell and was briefly
> touched upon in the original LN white paper. The mechanism of the
> time-denominated security parameter T in today's channel construction is
> enforced using OpCheckSequenceVerify. After broadcasting a commitment
> transaction, all outputs paying to the broadcaster of the commitment are
> encumbered with a relative time delay of T blocks, meaning they are unable
> to claim the funds until time T has elapsed. This time margin gives the
> honest party an opportunity to broadcast their punishment transaction
> iff, the broadcaster has broadcast a prior revoked state.
>
> The idea of time stomp is to introduce a special sequence-locks block
> height to the system. This block height would increase with each block
> along with the regular block height _unless_ the block reaches a certain
> sustained "high water mark". As an example, let's assume that when 3
> blocks in row are above 75% capacity, then the sequence-lock clock stops
> ticking.
>
> The effect of this change is to morph the security risk into simply a
> postponement of the judgment within the contract. With this, DoS attacks
> simply delay the (seemingly) inevitable punishment of the dishonest party
> within the contract.
>
> Aside from some informal discussions and the brief section within the
> original white paper, many details of this proposal are left
> underspecified. For example: how do miners signal to full nodes that the
> sequence-lock clock has stopped? What's the high water mark threshold? Can
> it go on indefinitely? Should this feature be opt-in?
>
> I think this proposal should be considered in tandem with the proposal
> within the xblock proposal as both have a few unanswered questions that
> need to be further explored.
>
> ## Pre-Allocated Smart-Contract Dispute Area (PASDA)
>
> Aight, now to the LN enhancing proposal that's buried within the
> greater xblock proposal. Introducing some new terminology, I've been
> calling this a: Pre-Allocated Smart-contract Dispute Arena or (PASDA) for
> short. In a nut shell, the key idea of the proposal is this: transactions
> that mark the commencement of a smart contract who's security depends on
> availability of block space for disputes are able to _pre allocate_ a
> section of the block that will _always_ be _reserved_ for dispute
> transactions. With this, contracts is  _guaranteed_ space in blocks to
> handle disputes in the case that the contract breaks down. As an analogy:
> when you enter in a contract with a contractor to build your dream
> kitchen, you _also_ go to a court and reserve a 1-hour block in their
> scheduled to handle a dispute _just in case_ one arises. In the event of a
> peaceful resolution to the contract, the space is freed up.
>
> The description in the paper is a bit light on the details, so I'll say up
> front that I'm extrapolating w.r.t to some mechanisms of the construction.
> However, I've been involved in some private conversations where the idea
> was thrown around, so I think I have enough context to _maybe_ fill in
> some of the gaps in the proposal.
>
> I'll now restate the proposal. Smart contract transactions set a certain
> bit in their version number. This bit indicates that they wish to
> pre-allocate N bytes in _all_ further blocks _until_ the contract has been
> reserved. In the specific context of payment channels, this means that
> once a channel is open, until it has been closed, it _decreases_ the
> available block size for all other transactions. As this is a very
> aggressive proposal I think the authors took advantage of the new design
> space within xblocks to include something that may not be readily accepted
> as a modification to the rules of the main chain.
>
> The concrete parameters chosen in the proposal are: each channel opening
> transaction reserves 700-bytes within _each_ block in the chain until the
> transaction has been closed. This pre-allocation has the following
> constraint: a transaction can _only_ take advantage of this allocation iff
> it's spending the _first_ output of a smart-contract transaction (has a
> particular bit in the version set). This means that only dispute
> resolution transactions can utilize this space.
>
> The proposal references two allocations, which I've squinted very hard at
> for half a day in an attempt to parse the rules governing them, but so far
> I've been unable to glean any further details. From my squinting, I
> interpret that half of the allocation is reserved for spending the
> self-output of a transaction in the last 2016 blocks (two weeks) and the
> other half is dedicated to spending the first output of a commitment
> transaction in the _same_ block.
>
> I'm unsure as to why these allocations are separate, and why they aren't
> just combined into a single allocation.
>
> ### Modification to LN Today
>
> This change would require a slight modification to LN as it's currently
> defined today. ATM, we use BIP 69 in order the inputs and outputs of a
> transaction. This is helpful as it lets us just send of signatures for new
> states as both sides already know the order of the inputs and outputs.
> With PASDA, we'd now need to omit the to-self-output (the output in my
> commitment transaction paying to myself my settled balance) from this
> ordering and _always_ make it the first output (txid:0).
>
> The second change is that this proposal puts a ceiling on on the CSV value
> allowed by any channel. All CSV delays _must-weeks otherwise, they're
> unable to take advantage of the arena.
>
> ### Modifications to Bitcoin
>
> In order to implement this within Bitcoin, a third utxo set (regular
> block, xblock) must be maintained by all full nodes. Alternatively, this
> can just be a bit in the xblock utxo set. The implementation doesn't
> really matter. Before attempting to pack transactions into a block, the
> total allocation within the PASDA utxo-set must be summed up, and
> subtracted from the block size cap. Only transactions which validly spend
> from one of these UTXO's are able to take advantage of the new space in
> the block.
>
> ## Analysis of PASDA
>
> OK, now for some analysis. First, let's assume that transactions which
> create PASDA UTXO's aren't subject to any additional constraints. If so,
> then this means that _any_ transaction can freely create PASDA UTXO's and
> _decrease_ the block size for _all_ transactions until the UTXO has been
> spent. If my interpretation is correct, then this introduces a new attack
> vector which allows _anyone_ to nearly permanently decrease the block size
> for all-time with next to zero additional cost. If this is correct, then
> it seems that miners have _zero_ incentive to _ever_ include a transaction
> that creates a PASDA output in their blocks as it robs them of future
> revenue and decreases the available capacity in the system, possibly
> permanently proportionally to _each_ unspent PASDA output in the chain.
>
> Alternatively, let's say the transactions which create PASDA outputs
> _must_ pay a disproportionately high fee in order to pay up front for
> their consumption of the size within all future blocks. If so, then a
> question that arises is: How large a fee? If the fee is very large, then
> the utilization of the smart-contract battling arena is only reserved to
> very high valued channels who can afford very high fees. This may be
> acceptable as if you have a $5 channel, then are you really at risk at
> such a large scale attack on Bitcoin just to steal $5 from you? It's
> important to note that many attacks on LN's contract resolution
> capabilities are also a direct attack on Bitcoin. However, in a world of
> dynamic fees, then it may be the case that the fee paid 6 months ago is
> now a measly fee an no longer covers the costs to miners (and even the
> entire system...).
>
> Finally, here's something I thought of earlier today that possibly
> mitigates the downside from the PoV of the miners (everyone else must
> still accept the costs of a permanent block size decrease). Let's say that
> in order to create a PASDA output fees are paid as normal. However, for
> _each_ subsequent block, the participants of the contract _must_ pay a
> tribute to miners to account for their loss in revenue due to the
> reduction in block size. Essentially, all PASDA outputs must pay _rent_
> for their pre-allocated space. If rent isn't paid sufficiently and on-time,
> then the pre-allocate arena space is revoked by miners. There're a few
> ways to construct this payment, but I'll leave that to follow up work as I
> just want to shed some light on the PASDA and its implications.
>
> ## Conclusion
>
> I've attempted to fill in some gaps for y'all w.r.t exactly what the
> sub-proposal within the greater xblock proposal consists of and some
> possible implications. I'd like to note that I've taken the liberty of
> filling on some gaps within the sub-proposal as only a single section
> within the greater proposal has been allocated to it. PASDA itself could
> likely fill up an entirely distinct propsal by itself spanning several
> pages. To the authors of the proposal: if my interpretation is inaccurate
> please correct me as I'd also like to better understand the proposal. It's
> possible that everything I've said in this (now rather long) email is
> incorrect.
>
> If you've made it this far, thank you for taking the time out of your day
> to consider my thoughts. It's my hope that we can further analyze this
> sub-proposal in detail and discuss its construction as well as its
> implications on smart-contracts like payment channels on top of Bitcoin.
>
> PASDA purports to address one half of the systematic risks in LN by
> possibly eliminating the DoS vector attack against LN. However, the costs
> of PASDA are very high, and possibly prohibitively so. In my opinion, the
> second attack vector lies in the ability of miners to arbitrarily censor
> transactions spending a particular output. Fungibility enhancing
> techniques such as Committed Transactions may be a viable path forward to
> patch this attack vector.
>
> -- roasbeef
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 4, 2017 at 8:35 PM Johnson Lau via bitcoin-dev <
> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>
>> I feel particularly disappointed that while this BIP is 80% similar to my
>> proposal made 2 months ago ( https://lists.linuxfoundation.
>> org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-January/013490.html ), Matt Corallo was
>> only the person replied me. Also, this BIP seems ignored the txid
>> malleability of the resolution tx, as my major technical critique of xblock
>> design.
>>
>> But anyway, here I’m only making comments on the design. As I said in my
>> earlier post, I consider this more as an academic topic than something
>> really ready for production use.
>>
>> > This specification defines a method of increasing bitcoin transaction
>> throughput without altering any existing consensus rules.
>>
>> Softforks by definition tighten consensus rules
>>
>> > There has been great debate regarding other ways of increasing
>> transaction throughput, with no proposed consensus-layer solutions that
>> have proven themselves to be particularly safe.
>>
>> so the authors don’t consider segwit as a consensus-layer solution to
>> increase transaction throughput, or not think segwit is safe? But logically
>> speaking if segwit is not safe, this BIP could only be worse. OTOH, segwit
>> also obviously increases tx throughput, although it may not be as much as
>> some people wish to have.
>>
>> > This specification refines many of Lau's ideas, and offers a much
>> simpler method of tackling the value transfer issue, which, in Lau's
>> proposal, was solved with consensus-layer UTXO selection.
>>
>> The 2013 one is outdated. As the authors are not quoting it, not sure if
>> they read my January proposal
>>
>> >  extension block activation entails BIP141 activation.
>>
>> I think extension block in the proposed form actually breaks BIP141. It
>> may say it activates segregated witness as a general idea, but not a
>> specific proposal like BIP141
>>
>> > The merkle root is to be calculated as a merkle tree with all extension
>> block txids and wtxids as the leaves.
>>
>> It needs to be more specific here. How are they exactly arranged? I
>> suggest it uses a root of all txids, and a root of all wtxids, and combine
>> them as the commitment. The reason is to allow people to prune the witness
>> data, yet still able to serve the pruned tx to light wallets. If it makes
>> txid and wtxid as pairs, after witness pruning it still needs to store all
>> the wtxids or it can’t reconstruct the tree
>>
>> > Outputs signal to exit the extension block if the contained script is
>> either a minimally encoded P2PKH or P2SH script.
>>
>> This hits the biggest question I asked in my January post: do you want to
>> allow direct exit payment to legacy addresses? As a block reorg will almost
>> guarantee changing txid of the resolution tx, that will permanently
>> invalidate all the child txs based on the resolution tx. This is a
>> significant change to the current tx model. To fix this, you need to make
>> exit outputs unspendable for up to 100 blocks. Doing this, however, will
>> make legacy wallet users very confused as they do not anticipate funding
>> being locked up for a long period of time. So you can’t let the money sent
>> back to a legacy address directly, but sent to a new format address that
>> only recognized by new wallet, which understands the lock up requirement.
>> This way, however, introduces friction and some fungibility issues, and I’d
>> expect people using cross chain atomic swap to exchange bitcoin and xbitcoin
>>
>> To summarise, my questions are:
>> 1. Is it acceptable to have massive txid malleability and transaction
>> chain invalidation for every natural happening reorg?  Yes: the current
>> spec is ok; No: next question (I’d say no)
>> 2. Is locking up exit outputs the best way to deal with the problem? (I
>> tried really hard to find a better solution but failed)
>> 3. How long the lock-up period should be? Answer could be anywhere from 1
>> to 100
>> 4. With a lock-up period, should it allow direct exit to legacy address?
>> (I think it’s ok if the lock-up is short, like 1-2 block. But is that safe
>> enough?)
>> 5. Due to the fungibility issues, it may need a new name for the tokens
>> in the ext-block
>>
>> > Verification of transactions within the extension block shall enforce
>> all currently deployed softforks, along with an extra BIP141-like ruleset.
>>
>> I suggest to only allow push-only and OP_RETURN scriptPubKey in xblock.
>> Especially, you don’t want to replicate the sighash bug to xblock. Also,
>> requires scriptSig to be always empty
>>
>> > This leaves room for 7 future soft-fork upgrades to relax DoS limits.
>>
>> Why 7? There are 16 unused witness program versions
>>
>> > Witness script hash v0 shall be worth the number of accurately counted
>> sigops in the redeem script, multiplied by a factor of 8.
>>
>> There is a flaw here: witness script with no sigop will be counted as 0
>> and have a lot free space
>>
>> > every 73 bytes in the serialized witness vector is worth 1 additional
>> point.
>>
>> so 72 bytes is 1 point or 0 point? Maybe it should just scale everything
>> up by 64 or 128, and make 1 witness byte = 1 point . So it won’t provide
>> any “free space” in the block.
>>
>> > Currently defined witness programs (v0) are each worth 8 points.
>> Unknown witness program outputs are worth 1 point. Any exiting output is
>> always worth 8 points.
>>
>> I’d suggest to have at least 16 points for each witness v0 output, so it
>> will make it always more expensive to create than spend UTXO. It may even
>> provide extra “discount” if a tx has more input than output. The overall
>> objective is to limit the UTXO growth. The ext block should be mainly for
>> making transactions, not store of value (I’ll explain later)
>>
>> > Dust Threshold
>>
>> In general I think it’s ok, but I’d suggest a higher threshold like 5000
>> satoshi. It may also combine the threshold with the output witness version,
>> so unknown version may have a lower or no threshold. Alternatively, it may
>> start with a high threshold and leave a backdoor softfork to reduce it.
>>
>> > Deactivation
>>
>> It is a double-edged sword. While it is good for us to be able to discard
>> an unused chain, it may create really bad user experience and people may
>> even lose money. For example, people may have opened Lightning channels and
>> they will find it not possible to close the channel. So you need to make
>> sure people are not making time-locked tx for years, and require people to
>> refresh their channel regularly. And have big red warning when the
>> deactivation SF is locked in. Generally, xblock with deactivation should
>> never be used as long-term storage of value.
>>
>> ————
>> some general comments:
>>
>> 1. This BIP in current form is not compatible with BIP141. Since most
>> nodes are already upgraded to BIP141, this BIP must not be activated unless
>> BIP141 failed to activate. However, if the community really endorse the
>> idea of ext block, I see no reason why we couldn’t activate BIP141 first
>> (which could be done in 2 weeks), then work together to make ext block
>> possible. Ext block is more complicated than segwit. If it took dozens of
>> developers a whole year to release segwit, I don’t see how ext block could
>> become ready for production with less time and efforts.
>>
>> 2. Another reason to make this BIP compatible with BIP141 is we also need
>> malleability fix in the main chain. As the xblock has a deactivation
>> mechanism, it can’t be used for longterm value storage.
>>
>> 3. I think the size and cost limit of the xblock should be lower at the
>> beginning, and increases as we find it works smoothly. It could be a
>> predefined growth curve like BIP103, or a backdoor softfork. With the
>> current design, it leaves a massive space for miners to fill up with non-tx
>> garbage. Also, I’d also like to see a complete SPV fraud-proof solution
>> before the size grows bigger.
>>
>>
>> > On 5 Apr 2017, at 02:03, Luke Dashjr via bitcoin-dev <
>> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > Recently there has been some discussion of an apparent work-in-progress
>> > extension block proposal by Christopher Jeffrey, Joseph Poon, Fedor
>> Indutny,
>> > and Steven Pair. Since this hasn't been formally posted on the ML yet,
>> perhaps
>> > it is still in pre-draft stages and not quite ready for review, but in
>> light
>> > of public interest, I think it is appropriate to open it to discussion,
>> and
>> > toward this end, I have reviewed the current revision.
>> >
>> > For reference, the WIP proposal itself is here:
>> >    https://github.com/tothemoon-org/extension-blocks
>> >
>> > ==Overall analysis & comparison==
>> >
>> > This is a relatively complicated proposal, creating a lot of additional
>> > technical debt and complexity in comparison to both BIP 141 and
>> hardforks. It
>> > offers no actual benefits beyond BIP 141 or hardforks, so seems
>> irrational to
>> > consider at face value. In fact, it fits much better the inaccurate
>> criticisms
>> > made by segwit detractors against BIP 141.
>> >
>> > That being said, this proposal is very interesting in construction and
>> is for
>> > the most part technically sound. While ill-fit to merely making blocks
>> larger,
>> > it may be an ideal fit for fundamentally different block designs such as
>> > Rootstock and MimbleWimble in absence of decentralised non-integrated
>> > sidechains (extension blocks are fundamentally sidechains tied into
>> Bitcoin
>> > directly).
>> >
>> > ==Fundamental problem==
>> >
>> > Extension blocks are a risk of creating two classes of "full nodes":
>> those
>> > which verify the full block (and are therefore truly full nodes), and
>> those
>> > which only verify the "base" block. However, because the extension is
>> > consensus-critical, the latter are in fact not full nodes at all, and
>> are left
>> > insecure like pseudo-SPV (not even real SPV) nodes. This technical
>> nature is
>> > of course true of a softfork as well, but softforks are intentionally
>> designed
>> > such that all nodes are capable of trivially upgrading, and there is no
>> > expectation for anyone to run with pre-softfork rules.
>> >
>> > In general, hardforks can provide the same benefits of an extension
>> block, but
>> > without the false expectation and pointless complexity.
>> >
>> > ==Other problems & questions==
>> >
>> >> These outpoints may not be spent inside the mempool (they must be
>> redeemed
>> > from the next resolution txid in reality).
>> >
>> > This breaks the ability to spend unconfirmed funds in the same block
>> (as is
>> > required for CPFP).
>> >
>> > The extension block's transaction count is not cryptographically
>> committed-to
>> > anywhere. (This is an outstanding bug in Bitcoin today, but impractical
>> to
>> > exploit in practice; however, exploiting it in an extension block may
>> not be
>> > as impractical, and it should be fixed given the opportunity.)
>> >
>> >> The merkle root is to be calculated as a merkle tree with all extension
>> > block txids and wtxids as the leaves.
>> >
>> > This needs to elaborate how the merkle tree is constructed. Are all the
>> txids
>> > followed by all the wtxids (tx hashes)? Are they alternated? Are txid
>> and
>> > wtxid trees built independently and merged at the tip?
>> >
>> >> Output script code aside from witness programs, p2pkh or p2sh is
>> considered
>> > invalid in extension blocks.
>> >
>> > Why? This prevents extblock users from sending to bare multisig or other
>> > various possible destinations. (While static address forms do not exist
>> for
>> > other types, they can all be used by the payment protocol.)
>> >
>> > Additionally, this forbids datacarrier (OP_RETURN), and forces spam to
>> create
>> > unprovably-unspendable UTXOs. Is that intentional?
>> >
>> >> The maximum extension size should be intentionally high.
>> >
>> > This has the same "attacks can do more damage than ordinary benefit"
>> issue as
>> > BIP141, but even more extreme since it is planned to be used for future
>> size
>> > increases.
>> >
>> >> Witness key hash v0 shall be worth 1 point, multiplied by a factor of
>> 8.
>> >
>> > What is a "point"? What does it mean multiplied by a factor of 8? Why
>> not just
>> > say "8 points"?
>> >
>> >> Witness script hash v0 shall be worth the number of accurately counted
>> > sigops in the redeem script, multiplied by a factor of 8.
>> >
>> > Please define "accurately counted" here. Is this using BIP16 static
>> counting,
>> > or accurately counting sigops during execution?
>> >
>> >> To reduce the chance of having redeem scripts which simply allow for
>> garbage
>> > data in the witness vector, every 73 bytes in the serialized witness
>> vector is
>> > worth 1 additional point.
>> >
>> > Is the size rounded up or down? If down, 72-byte scripts will carry 0
>> > points...)
>> >
>> > ==Trivial & process==
>> >
>> > BIPs must be in MediaWiki format, not Markdown. They should be
>> submitted for
>> > discussion to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, not social media and news.
>> >
>> >> Layer: Consensus (soft-fork)
>> >
>> > Extension blocks are more of a hard-fork IMO.
>> >
>> >> License: Public Domain
>> >
>> > BIPs may not be "public domain" due to non-recognition in some
>> jurisdictions.
>> > Can you agree on one or more of these?
>> > https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0002.
>> mediawiki#Recommended_licenses
>> >
>> >> ## Abstract
>> >>
>> >> This specification defines a method of increasing bitcoin transaction
>> > throughput without altering any existing consensus rules.
>> >
>> > This is inaccurate. Even softforks alter consensus rules.
>> >
>> >> ## Motivation
>> >>
>> >> Bitcoin retargetting ensures that the time in between mined blocks
>> will be
>> > roughly 10 minutes. It is not possible to change this rule. There has
>> been
>> > great debate regarding other ways of increasing transaction throughput,
>> with
>> > no proposed consensus-layer solutions that have proven themselves to be
>> > particularly safe.
>> >
>> > Block time seems entirely unrelated to this spec. Motivation is unclear.
>> >
>> >> Extension blocks leverage several features of BIP141, BIP143, and
>> BIP144 for
>> > transaction opt-in, serialization, verification, and network services,
>> and as
>> > such, extension block activation entails BIP141 activation.
>> >
>> > As stated in the next paragraph, the rules in BIP 141 are fundamentally
>> > incompatible with this one, so saying BIP 141 is activated is
>> confusingly
>> > incorrect.
>> >
>> >> This specification should be considered an extension and modification
>> to
>> > these BIPs. Extension blocks are _not_ compatible with BIP141 in its
>> current
>> > form, and will require a few minor additional rules.
>> >
>> > Extension blocks should be compatible with BIP 141, there doesn’t
>> appear to be
>> > any justification for not making them compatible.
>> >
>> >> This specification prescribes a way of fooling non-upgraded nodes into
>> > believing the existing UTXO set is still behaving as they would expect.
>> >
>> > The UTXO set behaves fundamentally different to old nodes with this
>> proposal,
>> > albeit in a mostly compatible manner.
>> >
>> >> Note that canonical blocks containing entering outputs MUST contain an
>> > extension block commitment (all zeroes if nothing is present in the
>> extension
>> > block).
>> >
>> > Please explain why in Rationale.
>> >
>> >> Coinbase outputs MUST NOT contain witness programs, as they cannot be
>> > sweeped by the resolution transaction due to previously existing
>> consensus
>> > rules.
>> >
>> > Seems like an annoying technical debt. I wonder if it can be avoided.
>> >
>> >> The genesis resolution transaction MAY also include a 1-100 byte
>> pushdata in
>> > the first input script, allowing the miner of the genesis resolution to
>> add a
>> > special message. The pushdata MUST be castable to a true boolean.
>> >
>> > Why? Unlike the coinbase, this seems to create additional technical
>> debt with
>> > no apparent purpose. Better to just have a consensus rule every input
>> must be
>> > null.
>> >
>> >> The resolution transaction's version MUST be set to the uint32 max
>> (`2^32 -
>> > 1`).
>> >
>> > Transaction versions are signed, so I assume this is actually simply -1.
>> > (While signed transaction versions seemed silly to me, using it for
>> special
>> > cases like this actually makes sense.)
>> >
>> >> ### Exiting the extension block
>> >
>> > Should specify that spending such an exit must use the resolution txid,
>> not
>> > the extblock's txid.
>> >
>> >> On the policy layer, transaction fees may be calculated by transaction
>> cost
>> > as well as additional size/legacy-sigops added to the canonical block
>> due to
>> > entering or exiting outputs.
>> >
>> > BIPs should not specify policy at all. Perhaps prefix "For the
>> avoidance of
>> > doubt:" to be clear that miners may perform any fee logic they like.
>> >
>> >> Transactions within the extended transaction vector MAY include a
>> witness
>> > vector using BIP141 transaction serialization.
>> >
>> > Since extblock transactions are all required to be segwit, why wouldn't
>> this
>> > be mandatory?
>> >
>> >> - BIP141's nested P2SH feature is no longer available, and no longer a
>> > consensus rule.
>> >
>> > Note this makes adoption slower: wallets cannot use the extblock until
>> the
>> > economy has updated to support segwit-native addresses.
>> >
>> >> To reduce the chance of having redeem scripts which simply allow for
>> garbage
>> > data in the witness vector, every 73 bytes in the serialized witness
>> vector is
>> > worth 1 additional point.
>> >
>> > Please explain why 73 bytes in Rationale.
>> >
>> >> This leaves room for 7 future soft-fork upgrades to relax DoS limits.
>> >
>> > How so? Please explain.
>> >
>> >> A consensus dust threshold is now enforced within the extension block.
>> >
>> > Why?
>> >
>> >> If the second highest transaction version bit (30th bit) is set to to
>> `1`
>> > within an extension block transaction, an extra 700-bytes is reserved
>> on the
>> > transaction space used up in the block.
>> >
>> > Why wouldn't users set this on all transactions?
>> >
>> >> `default_witness_commitment` has been renamed to
>> > `default_extension_commitment` and includes the extension block
>> commitment
>> > script.
>> >
>> > `default_witness_commitment` was never part of the GBT spec. At least
>> describe
>> > what this new key is.
>> >
>> >> - Deployment name: `extblk` (appears as `!extblk` in GBT).
>> >
>> > Should be just `extblk` if backward compatibility is supported (and
>> `!extblk`
>> > when not).
>> >
>> >> The "deactivation" deployment's start time...
>> >
>> > What about timeout? None? To continue the extension block, must it be
>> > deactivated and reactivated in parallel?
>> >
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > bitcoin-dev mailing list
>> > bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
>> > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> bitcoin-dev mailing list
>> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>
>

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Re: [bitcoin-dev] Extension block proposal by Jeffrey et al

[Joseph Poon]

On Wed, Apr 05, 2017 at 11:37:22AM -0400, Greg Sanders via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> I'd appreciate the authors chiming in, but I read the PASDA differently:
> 
> 1) If a transaction is mined with a certain bit set, it reserves 700 bytes
> for that particular block.
> 2) In that space, 2 transactions may happen:
> a) First, a transaction penalizing the "parent" transaction for fraud by
> spending the funds immediately
> b) Second, a "free rider" transaction that penalizes fraud within a ~2 week
> window
> 
> This means during systematic flooding of closing transactions by
> Goldfinger, vigilant watchers of their channels can immediately punish the
> fraud in the same block using (a), and if they are unable to, need to find
> space within two weeks in (b).
> 
> This is really in the LN weeds however, so I'll refrain from evaluating the
> efficacy of such a solution.

Yes, that is correct. I haven't had a chance to review Laolu's summary
yet, haven't had a chance to talk to him today since I was away from the
keyboard for most of the day, would have been unable to review things.

Section "b" above only allows for free riding on the first output of a
transaction with the bit set within the past 2016 blocks. It does not
allow free riding on outputs without that bit set in the transaction.

Additionally, the presumption is that the attacker fills up the
mempool with incorrect prior commitment transactions.

The attack scenario is Mallory asks everyone to open a channel with her.
Mallory only has 1 BTC. With sufficiently low tx fees, Mallory can use
that one bitcoin to open many ~1 BTC channels. All of those channels had
a prior state which Mallory had ~1 BTC, and a current state where she
has none. She broadcasts these thousands of prior states where she has
~1 BTC.

The presumption is the penalty transaction in many cases has a very
small fee, since it is already covered by the commitment.

This mitigates systemic goldfinger attacks since it is unlikely they can
get enough transactions in. Additionally the transactions waiting on the
mempool allows for many to be notified and fill up the first reserved
space. The attacker would likely be attempting to fill up the mempool
(longer block times help here with security!!!). It is presumed that
there is some small amount in reserve so there is some fee reward
covered for enforcing the penalty. This construction allows for the
amount in reserve to be significantly smaller and much more resilient
against even the largest of goldfinger attacks.

(This isn't a full mitigation, as there are certain conditions related
to miner-attacker coordination with high hashpower. Attacker-Miner
coordination is presumed to be out-of-scope, especially in relation to
51% attacks, since it's sort of a moot point, if they have the funds to
mount this attack so that it's profitable, it gets pretty close for them
to have a very significant hashpower anyway.)

I'll add a clarification to the specification on github soon. The intent
of this is to reduce the cost of setting up LN channels with funds in
reserve, with minimal code changes. Future changes which could be
desired if this is usable would be use additional tx flag bits to select
how many outputs in a transaction apply to enable a large payment of
funds pending in-flight.

-- 
Joseph Poon

Re: [bitcoin-dev] Extension block proposal by Jeffrey et al

[Christopher Jeffrey]

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Hi Luke,

Thank you for the review. Many of these points should definitely be
addressed in the spec. Although extension blocks has working code, the
spec is currently still in a draft state now and could really use all
the feedback it can get. A few rules are still up in the air before we
setup a public testnet for it.

There's understandable confusion about this, but this proposal is not
meant to be a BIP. If it were meant to be a BIP, we still might not have
even submitted it yet as it needs a bit more revision still.

I'm just going to go over a lot of these and explain the reasoning.

> This breaks the ability to spend unconfirmed funds in the same block
> (as is required for CPFP).

Yeah, child-pays-for-parent is practically impossible for exiting
outputs. I don't see a good way around this. We tried to figure out a
decent solution while initially drafting this. It's possible with tons
of trickery, but likely not worth it.

> The extension block's transaction count is not cryptographically
> committed-to anywhere. (This is an outstanding bug in Bitcoin today,
> but impractical to exploit in practice; however, exploiting it in an
> extension block may not be as impractical, and it should be fixed
> given the opportunity.)

Yes. The merkle commitments are something we could definitely improve.
Open to suggestions. Personally, I don't consider myself a merkle
expert.

> This needs to elaborate how the merkle tree is constructed. Are all
> the txids followed by all the wtxids (tx hashes)? Are they alternated?
> Are txid and wtxid trees built independently and merged at the tip?

As of right now, the reference implementation uses the former, but
again, the merkle commitments are something up in the air. It'd be nice
to keep it as flexible as possible for SPV proofs on either the txids or
wxtids.

> Why? This prevents extblock users from sending to bare multisig or
> other various possible destinations. (While static address forms do
> not exist for other types, they can all be used by the payment
> protocol.)

Requiring only p2pkh and p2sh for exits reduces the possibility of more
UTXO set size bloat (at least slightly). Non-standard scripts are a
problem since they cannot be compressed for storage. I don't see it as
important to allow naked multisig outputs. Currently, if users wanted to
use a naked multisig (why?), they can always use the 1mb chain directly.

> Additionally, this forbids datacarrier (OP_RETURN), and forces spam to
> create unprovably-unspendable UTXOs. Is that intentional?

All outputs within the extension block are meant to be witness programs.
This was done for simplicity. The 1mb chain is still usable for any
OP_RETURNs committed to the chain. More thought on this would be good
though.

> > The maximum extension size should be intentionally high.
>
> This has the same "attacks can do more damage than ordinary benefit"
> issue as BIP141, but even more extreme since it is planned to be used
> for future size increases.

> What is a "point"? What does it mean multiplied by a factor of 8? Why
> not just say "8 points"?

Just for consistency of wording.

The notion of cost creates a system of points which are multiplied by a
factor chosen by the witness program version. Unknown witness programs
have a factor of 1. If, in the future, we soft-fork in a new witness
program version, its chosen factor could be 7 or 6. The idea being,
future versions could add less "cost" to the block, allowing for
relaxing dos limits over time via soft-fork.

I would much rather have people arguing over whether to soft-fork dos
limits than whether to hard-fork dos limits.

So the idea here is, we have a hard limit (say 6mb) for quick sanity
checking and DoS prevention, and a soft-forkable soft limit (e.g. 2mb).

Having unknown witness program versions be worth only 1 point does
enable the possibility that a worst case block could be up to the "hard"
max extension size limit. This is also a possibility with segwit, but
yes, less severe with segwit assuming the max ext. block size is above
3mb.

More discussion and running of numbers is probably necessary before we
come up with optimal limits here.

> Please define "accurately counted" here. Is this using BIP16 static
> counting, or accurately counting sigops during execution?

It's meant to refer to BIP16 static counting. I believe the actual
argument passed to the function in Bitcoin Core is called `fAccurate`.
Many other implementations use the same terminology. The counting during
execution proposed by Gavin's hardfork BIP isn't widely implemented as
far as I know.

> Is the size rounded up or down? If down, 72-byte scripts will carry 0
> points...)

Rounded up. The code included this earlier, but I took the whole
weighing against size out temporarily. Will be updated to match the
spec.

> BIPs must be in MediaWiki format, not Markdown. They should be
> submitted for discussion to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, not social
> media and news.

Yeah, that's sort of a bias of mine. I prefer markdown, and everyone
else helping out with the spec seemed to be okay with my preference. The
mediawiki format is offensive to me. In any case, this isn't really
meant to be a BIP.

> Extension blocks are more of a hard-fork IMO.

Could you expand on why you consider this a hardfork?

> Block time seems entirely unrelated to this spec. Motivation is
> unclear.

Transaction throughput is related to this spec. Block time and size are
both related to transaction throughput. It's meant to say something to
the effect of "changing retargetting is likely infeasible with a
soft-fork, but changing block size may not be as much of a problem."
Could be reworded.

> As stated in the next paragraph, the rules in BIP 141 are
> fundamentally incompatible with this one, so saying BIP 141 is
> activated is confusingly incorrect.

True. Should be reworded.

> Extension blocks should be compatible with BIP 141, there doesn’t
> appear to be any justification for not making them compatible.

The implementation initially seemed a lot simpler when moving all segwit
behavior to the extension block. The initial conception was to have all
witness programs be entrances into and scripts within the extension
block, but I guess there's no reason we couldn't do something like
Johnson proposed and have different witness program versions be the
ext-block-only programs. It just involves me rewriting a bit of code in
the reference implementation, and backporting a lot of code to the
original branch.

> > Note that canonical blocks containing entering outputs MUST contain
> > an extension block commitment (all zeroes if nothing is present in
> > the extension block).
>
> Please explain why in Rationale.

This can be removed, and something I initially added to my own code
during initial implementation as a simple check ahead of time to check
for entering outputs.

> > Coinbase outputs MUST NOT contain witness programs, as they cannot
> > be sweeped by the resolution transaction due to previously existing
> > consensus rules.
>
> Seems like an annoying technical debt. I wonder if it can be avoided.

I think there is a way around it, just not a real viable way: requiring
miners to resolve the witness program outputs in the coinbase 100 blocks
ago. But this will cause miners to attack each other, since they're now
potentially adding size to another miners block. It also causes a load
of other issues with wallets.

I don't see the coinbase output rule as that much of an issue though.
The 1mb chain will remain the realm of miners and long-term hodlers for
sure. If they want to switch to the ext. block, they can always just
sweep their outputs.

> Why? Unlike the coinbase, this seems to create additional technical
> debt with no apparent purpose. Better to just have a consensus rule
> every input must be null.

It's a pretty simple consensus check, and might be a fun extra to have.
The genesis block has a pretty unique mystique to it. Might be fun to
replicate that in the genesis resolution.

> Transaction versions are signed, so I assume this is actually simply
> -1.  (While signed transaction versions seemed silly to me, using it
> for special cases like this actually makes sense.)

Yeah, transaction versions are just bits as far as I'm concerned. It
depends on how you want to interpret them. But yeah, it would be `-1` if
you were to consider it an int32. My own code just treats them as
unsigned.

> Should specify that spending such an exit must use the resolution
> txid, not the extblock's txid.

Agreed.

> BIPs should not specify policy at all. Perhaps prefix "For the
> avoidance of doubt:" to be clear that miners may perform any fee logic
> they like.

Mentioning policy as an aside seemed useful here for now for a clearer
understanding. A good deal of this spec may be separated out as some
kind of commentary on implementation details eventually.

> Since extblock transactions are all required to be segwit, why
> wouldn't this be mandatory?

That was originally only referring to serialization (segwit allows empty
witness vectors in serialization). I will reword this to refer to
verification only.

> Note this makes adoption slower: wallets cannot use the extblock until
> the economy has updated to support segwit-native addresses.

Nested P2SH would be hard to do for the ext. block, short of some added
trickery (miners only redeeming that output for entrance once the redeem
script is revealed).

> Please explain why 73 bytes in Rationale.

DER-formatted signature size. "Inputs cost" was originally designed to
reflect sigops. To prevent tons of garbage data in the witness vector,
the vector's size is also considered a "sigop/cost" for every 73 bytes.
It should probably start weighing sigops points and size points
differently though, or treat them as separate metrics.

> > A consensus dust threshold is now enforced within the extension
> > block.
>
> Why?

Another measure to potentially reduce UTXO spam. Will clarify.

> Why wouldn't users set this on all transactions?

It looks like Laolu beat me to commenting on this. Both Joseph and Laolu
will have better commentary on this than me, so I'll let them handle
this.

> > The "deactivation" deployment's start time...
>
> What about timeout? None? To continue the extension block, must it be
> deactivated and reactivated in parallel?

Timeout of 1 year. That may have gotten lost in the frequent revisions
we did.

Once voting has successfully activated the deactivation bit, the
locked-in time is 26 retarget intervals (approx. 1 year).

So, the simplest proposal for deactivation we came up with returns the
OP_TRUE to being anyone-can-spend. By that time, a future softfork
(activated in the same versionbit) can introduce code to handle the
migration of funds elsewhere. The anyone-can-spend part does sound
pretty odd at first glance, but it's the only way to get new behavior in
here without a hardfork.

The merkle proof proposal is tougher, because we would have to write
code _now_ to handle the migration. And since we don't know what future
extension blocks might look like or how they might behave, this is
pretty difficult.

---

I will open a few issues on the repo for some of the points made here.

--
Christopher Jeffrey (JJ) <chjj@purse.io>
CTO & Bitcoin Menace, purse.io
https://github.com/chjj

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Re: [bitcoin-dev] Extension block proposal by Jeffrey et al

[Johnson Lau]

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> On 5 Apr 2017, at 22:05, Olaoluwa Osuntokun <laolu32@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> The concrete parameters chosen in the proposal are: each channel opening
> transaction reserves 700-bytes within _each_ block in the chain until the
> transaction has been closed. 
> 
> 

Why so? It seems you are describing it as a softfork. With hardfork or extension block, a new rule could simply grant extra space when the tagged UTXO is spent. So if the usual block size limit is 1MB, when the special UTXO is made, the block size limit decreases to 1MB-700 byte, and the user has to pay for that 700 byte. When it is spent, the block size will become 1MB+700 byte.

But miners or even users may abuse this system: they may try to claim all the unused space when the blocks are not congested, or when they are mining empty block, and sell those tagged UTXO later. So I think we need to limit the reservable space in each block, and deduct more space than it is reserved. For example, if 700 bytes are reserved, the deduction has to be 1400 byte.

With BIP68, there are 8 unused bits in nSequence. We may use a few bits to let users to fine tune the space they want to reserve. Maybe 1 = 256 bytes

I think this is an interesting idea to explorer and I’d like to include this in my hardfork proposal.


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Re: [bitcoin-dev] Extension block proposal by Jeffrey et al

[Christopher Jeffrey]

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Hi Johnson,

Really appreciate the comments. I know this idea is your baby.

> so the authors don’t consider segwit as a consensus-layer solution to
> increase transaction throughput, or not think segwit is safe? But
> logically speaking if segwit is not safe, this BIP could only be
> worse. OTOH, segwit also obviously increases tx throughput, although
> it may not be as much as some people wish to have.

Segwit wasn't considered to be a part of that statement. It was
referring to the numerous hardfork proposals we've seen over the past
few years. Segwit is safe, but wouldn't be a comparable block size
increase to what ext. blocks could potentially offer.

> I think extension block in the proposed form actually breaks BIP141.
> It may say it activates segregated witness as a general idea, but not
> a specific proposal like BIP141

Agreed. Needs to be reworded as it currently stands. Though, I suppose
it would be possible to allow for compatibility with segwit in the
mainchain if we utilize your idea of using a separate wit. program
versions for the extension block. A slightly minor change to the spec,
just a big change to the reference impl. code. It is doable.

> This hits the biggest question I asked in my January post: do you want
> to allow direct exit payment to legacy addresses? As a block reorg
> will almost guarantee changing txid of the resolution tx, that will
> permanently invalidate all the child txs based on the resolution tx.
> This is a significant change to the current tx model. To fix this, you
> need to make exit outputs unspendable for up to 100 blocks. Doing
> this, however, will make legacy wallet users very confused as they do
> not anticipate funding being locked up for a long period of time. So
> you can’t let the money sent back to a legacy address directly, but
> sent to a new format address that only recognized by new wallet, which
> understands the lock up requirement. This way, however, introduces
> friction and some fungibility issues, and I’d expect people using
> cross chain atomic swap to exchange bitcoin and xbitcoin

Yes, this issue is probably the biggest edge case in the proposal.

I think there's two possible solutions:

First solution:

Like you said, add a maturity requirement for exiting outputs. Likely
lower than coinbase's 100 block requirement. To solve the issue of
non-upgraded wallets not being aware of this rule and spending early,
have upgraded mempool implementations accept/relay txs that contain
early spends of exits, but not mine them until they are mature. This way
non-upgraded wallets do not end up broadcasting transactions that are
considered invalid to the rest of the network.

Depending on how wallets handle reorgs, a non-upgraded wallet may put
reorg'd spend chains from exits back into an unconfirmed state, when in
reality they should probably delete them or mark them conflicted in some
way. This may be an acceptable compromise as the wallet will still see
the funds as unconfirmed when they really don't exist anymore, but maybe
unconfirmed is good enough. Users are pretty used to dropping
non-confirming txs from their wallet, and this is much better than
legacy wallets seeing there funds as confirmed when they could be
permanently reorged out at any moment.

Second solution:

Move all exiting outputs to the coinbase. This will enforce a 100 block
maturity requirement and non-upgraded wallets will be aware of this.

The first solution might require more implementation, but allows more
flexibility with the maturity requirement. The second solution is
possibly simpler, but sticks to a hard 100 block limit.

> 1. Is it acceptable to have massive txid malleability and transaction
> chain invalidation for every natural happening reorg?  Yes: the
> current spec is ok; No: next question (I’d say no)

Answered above.

> 2. Is locking up exit outputs the best way to deal with the problem?
> (I tried really hard to find a better solution but failed)

You've probably thought about this more than anyone, so I'd say yes, it
may be the only way. Painful, but necessary.

> 3. How long the lock-up period should be? Answer could be anywhere
> from 1 to 100

I imagine having something lower than 100 would be preferable to users,
maybe somewhere in the 5 to 15 range. A 15 block reorg on mainnet is
seriously unlikely unless something strange is happening. A 5 block
reorg is still pretty unlikely, but possible. The coinbase solution only
allows for 100 blocks though.

> 4. With a lock-up period, should it allow direct exit to legacy
> address? (I think it’s ok if the lock-up is short, like 1-2 block. But
> is that safe enough?)

I think so. Adding a kind of special address probably creates more
issues than it solves.

> 5. Due to the fungibility issues, it may need a new name for the
> tokens in the ext-block

I suppose the market will decide whether that's the case.

It's worth noting, if segwit is not activated on the mainchain, it
creates a much bigger incentive to use the extension block, and
potentially ensures that users will have less of a reason to exit.

--
Christopher Jeffrey (JJ) <chjjeffrey@gmail.com>
CTO & Bitcoin Menace, purse.io
https://github.com/chjj

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Re: [bitcoin-dev] Extension block proposal by Jeffrey et al

[Luke Dashjr]

On Wednesday, April 05, 2017 4:54:05 PM Christopher Jeffrey via bitcoin-dev 
wrote:
> There's understandable confusion about this, but this proposal is not
> meant to be a BIP.

Oh? If this was not meant to be a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, perhaps you 
should clarify somewhere what altcoin you are proposing it for. As it stands, 
it certainly did read much like it was meant to be a BIP, and apparently many 
others thought so as well.

Admittedly, the bitcoin-dev ML isn't the place for altcoin discussions, and 
I'm not particularly interested in spending my time aiding altcoins, so I'll 
just end the conversation here until someone re-proposes something similar for 
Bitcoin.

Sorry for confusing the nature of your work,

Luke

Re: [bitcoin-dev] Extension block proposal by Jeffrey et al

[Johnson Lau]

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> On 6 Apr 2017, at 01:43, Christopher Jeffrey <chjj@purse.io> wrote:
> 
> 
>> This hits the biggest question I asked in my January post: do you want
>> to allow direct exit payment to legacy addresses? As a block reorg
>> will almost guarantee changing txid of the resolution tx, that will
>> permanently invalidate all the child txs based on the resolution tx.
>> This is a significant change to the current tx model. To fix this, you
>> need to make exit outputs unspendable for up to 100 blocks. Doing
>> this, however, will make legacy wallet users very confused as they do
>> not anticipate funding being locked up for a long period of time. So
>> you can’t let the money sent back to a legacy address directly, but
>> sent to a new format address that only recognized by new wallet, which
>> understands the lock up requirement. This way, however, introduces
>> friction and some fungibility issues, and I’d expect people using
>> cross chain atomic swap to exchange bitcoin and xbitcoin
> 
> Yes, this issue is probably the biggest edge case in the proposal.
> 
> I think there's two possible solutions:
> 
> First solution:
> 
> Like you said, add a maturity requirement for exiting outputs. Likely
> lower than coinbase's 100 block requirement. To solve the issue of
> non-upgraded wallets not being aware of this rule and spending early,
> have upgraded mempool implementations accept/relay txs that contain
> early spends of exits, but not mine them until they are mature. This way
> non-upgraded wallets do not end up broadcasting transactions that are
> considered invalid to the rest of the network.

This won’t solve the problem. Think about the following conversation:

Alice (not upgraded): Please pay 1 BTC to my address 1ALicExyz
Bob (upgraded): ok, paid, please check

10 minutes later

Alice: received and confirmed, thanks!

5 minutes later:

Carol (not upgraded): Please pay 0.5BTC to my address 3CaroLXXX
Alice: paid, please check

1 hour later:

Carol: it’s not confirmed. Have you paid enough fees?
Alice: ok, I’ll RBF/CPFP it

2 hours later:

Carol: it’s still not confirmed.
Alice: I have already paid double fees. Maybe the network is congested and I need to pay more…..

Repeat until the lock up period ends.

So this so-called “softfork” actually made non-upgraded wallet totally unusable. If failed to meet the very important requirement of a softfork: backward compatibility

More discussion:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/013985.html <https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/013985.html>


> 
> Depending on how wallets handle reorgs, a non-upgraded wallet may put
> reorg'd spend chains from exits back into an unconfirmed state, when in
> reality they should probably delete them or mark them conflicted in some
> way. This may be an acceptable compromise as the wallet will still see
> the funds as unconfirmed when they really don't exist anymore, but maybe
> unconfirmed is good enough. Users are pretty used to dropping
> non-confirming txs from their wallet, and this is much better than
> legacy wallets seeing there funds as confirmed when they could be
> permanently reorged out at any moment.
> 
> Second solution:
> 
> Move all exiting outputs to the coinbase. This will enforce a 100 block
> maturity requirement and non-upgraded wallets will be aware of this.

This is also unacceptable.

When someone says "Please pay 1 BTC to my address 1ALicExyz”, no one anticipates being paid by a coinbase output. Some exchanges like btc-e explicitly reject coinbase payment.

Such deterioration in user experience is unacceptable. It basically forces everyone to upgrade, i.e. a hardfork with soft fork’s skin



> 
> The first solution might require more implementation, but allows more
> flexibility with the maturity requirement. The second solution is
> possibly simpler, but sticks to a hard 100 block limit.
> 
>> 1. Is it acceptable to have massive txid malleability and transaction
>> chain invalidation for every natural happening reorg?  Yes: the
>> current spec is ok; No: next question (I’d say no)
> 
> Answered above.
> 
>> 2. Is locking up exit outputs the best way to deal with the problem?
>> (I tried really hard to find a better solution but failed)
> 
> You've probably thought about this more than anyone, so I'd say yes, it
> may be the only way. Painful, but necessary.
> 
>> 3. How long the lock-up period should be? Answer could be anywhere
>> from 1 to 100
> 
> I imagine having something lower than 100 would be preferable to users,
> maybe somewhere in the 5 to 15 range. A 15 block reorg on mainnet is
> seriously unlikely unless something strange is happening. A 5 block
> reorg is still pretty unlikely, but possible. The coinbase solution only
> allows for 100 blocks though.
> 
>> 4. With a lock-up period, should it allow direct exit to legacy
>> address? (I think it’s ok if the lock-up is short, like 1-2 block. But
>> is that safe enough?)
> 
> I think so. Adding a kind of special address probably creates more
> issues than it solves.


As I explained above, no legacy wallet would anticipate a lock up. If you want to make a softfork, all burden of incompatibility must be taken by the upgraded system. Only allow exit to a new address guarantees that only upgraded wallet will see the locked-up tx:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-January/013490.html <https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-January/013490.html>
> 
>> 5. Due to the fungibility issues, it may need a new name for the
>> tokens in the ext-block
> 
> I suppose the market will decide whether that's the case.
> 
> It's worth noting, if segwit is not activated on the mainchain, it
> creates a much bigger incentive to use the extension block, and
> potentially ensures that users will have less of a reason to exit.
> 

I think it’s unacceptable if malleability is not fixed in main chain, for 3 reasons: 

1. a solution is *already* available and tested for > 1 year.

2. the deactivation design (which I think is an interesting idea) makes the ext block unsuitable for long-term storage of value.

3. LN over main chain allows instant exchange of main coin and xcoin without going through the ugly 2-way-peg process.




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Re: [bitcoin-dev] Extension block proposal by Jeffrey et al

[Christopher Jeffrey]

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Johnson,

Yeah, I do still see the issue. I think there are still some reasonable
ways to mitigate it.

I've started revising the extension block specification/code to coexist
with mainchain segwit. I think the benefit of this is that we can
require exiting outputs to only be witness programs. Presumably segwit
wallets will be more likely to be aware of a new output maturity rule
(I've opened a PR[1] which describes this in greater detail). I think
this probably reduces the likelihood of the legacy wallet issue,
assuming most segwit-supporting wallets would implement this rule before
the activation of segwit.

What's your opinion on whether this would have a great enough effect to
prevent the legacy wallet issue? I think switching to witness programs
only may be a good balance between fungibility and backward-compat,
probably better all around than creating a whole new
addr-type/wit-program just for exits.

[1] https://github.com/tothemoon-org/extension-blocks/pull/16

On Mon, Apr 10, 2017 at 06:14:36PM +0800, Johnson Lau wrote:
>
> > On 6 Apr 2017, at 01:43, Christopher Jeffrey <chjj@purse.io> wrote:
> >
> >
> >> This hits the biggest question I asked in my January post: do you want
> >> to allow direct exit payment to legacy addresses? As a block reorg
> >> will almost guarantee changing txid of the resolution tx, that will
> >> permanently invalidate all the child txs based on the resolution tx.
> >> This is a significant change to the current tx model. To fix this, you
> >> need to make exit outputs unspendable for up to 100 blocks. Doing
> >> this, however, will make legacy wallet users very confused as they do
> >> not anticipate funding being locked up for a long period of time. So
> >> you can’t let the money sent back to a legacy address directly, but
> >> sent to a new format address that only recognized by new wallet, which
> >> understands the lock up requirement. This way, however, introduces
> >> friction and some fungibility issues, and I’d expect people using
> >> cross chain atomic swap to exchange bitcoin and xbitcoin
> >
> > Yes, this issue is probably the biggest edge case in the proposal.
> >
> > I think there's two possible solutions:
> >
> > First solution:
> >
> > Like you said, add a maturity requirement for exiting outputs. Likely
> > lower than coinbase's 100 block requirement. To solve the issue of
> > non-upgraded wallets not being aware of this rule and spending early,
> > have upgraded mempool implementations accept/relay txs that contain
> > early spends of exits, but not mine them until they are mature. This way
> > non-upgraded wallets do not end up broadcasting transactions that are
> > considered invalid to the rest of the network.
>
> This won’t solve the problem. Think about the following conversation:
>
> Alice (not upgraded): Please pay 1 BTC to my address 1ALicExyz
> Bob (upgraded): ok, paid, please check
>
> 10 minutes later
>
> Alice: received and confirmed, thanks!
>
> 5 minutes later:
>
> Carol (not upgraded): Please pay 0.5BTC to my address 3CaroLXXX
> Alice: paid, please check
>
> 1 hour later:
>
> Carol: it’s not confirmed. Have you paid enough fees?
> Alice: ok, I’ll RBF/CPFP it
>
> 2 hours later:
>
> Carol: it’s still not confirmed.
> Alice: I have already paid double fees. Maybe the network is congested and I need to pay more…..
>
> Repeat until the lock up period ends.
>
> So this so-called “softfork” actually made non-upgraded wallet totally unusable. If failed to meet the very important requirement of a softfork: backward compatibility
>
> More discussion:
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/013985.html <https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/013985.html>
>
>
> >
> > Depending on how wallets handle reorgs, a non-upgraded wallet may put
> > reorg'd spend chains from exits back into an unconfirmed state, when in
> > reality they should probably delete them or mark them conflicted in some
> > way. This may be an acceptable compromise as the wallet will still see
> > the funds as unconfirmed when they really don't exist anymore, but maybe
> > unconfirmed is good enough. Users are pretty used to dropping
> > non-confirming txs from their wallet, and this is much better than
> > legacy wallets seeing there funds as confirmed when they could be
> > permanently reorged out at any moment.
> >
> > Second solution:
> >
> > Move all exiting outputs to the coinbase. This will enforce a 100 block
> > maturity requirement and non-upgraded wallets will be aware of this.
>
> This is also unacceptable.
>
> When someone says "Please pay 1 BTC to my address 1ALicExyz”, no one anticipates being paid by a coinbase output. Some exchanges like btc-e explicitly reject coinbase payment.
>
> Such deterioration in user experience is unacceptable. It basically forces everyone to upgrade, i.e. a hardfork with soft fork’s skin
>
>
>
> >
> > The first solution might require more implementation, but allows more
> > flexibility with the maturity requirement. The second solution is
> > possibly simpler, but sticks to a hard 100 block limit.
> >
> >> 1. Is it acceptable to have massive txid malleability and transaction
> >> chain invalidation for every natural happening reorg?  Yes: the
> >> current spec is ok; No: next question (I’d say no)
> >
> > Answered above.
> >
> >> 2. Is locking up exit outputs the best way to deal with the problem?
> >> (I tried really hard to find a better solution but failed)
> >
> > You've probably thought about this more than anyone, so I'd say yes, it
> > may be the only way. Painful, but necessary.
> >
> >> 3. How long the lock-up period should be? Answer could be anywhere
> >> from 1 to 100
> >
> > I imagine having something lower than 100 would be preferable to users,
> > maybe somewhere in the 5 to 15 range. A 15 block reorg on mainnet is
> > seriously unlikely unless something strange is happening. A 5 block
> > reorg is still pretty unlikely, but possible. The coinbase solution only
> > allows for 100 blocks though.
> >
> >> 4. With a lock-up period, should it allow direct exit to legacy
> >> address? (I think it’s ok if the lock-up is short, like 1-2 block. But
> >> is that safe enough?)
> >
> > I think so. Adding a kind of special address probably creates more
> > issues than it solves.
>
>
> As I explained above, no legacy wallet would anticipate a lock up. If you want to make a softfork, all burden of incompatibility must be taken by the upgraded system. Only allow exit to a new address guarantees that only upgraded wallet will see the locked-up tx:
>
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-January/013490.html <https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-January/013490.html>
> >
> >> 5. Due to the fungibility issues, it may need a new name for the
> >> tokens in the ext-block
> >
> > I suppose the market will decide whether that's the case.
> >
> > It's worth noting, if segwit is not activated on the mainchain, it
> > creates a much bigger incentive to use the extension block, and
> > potentially ensures that users will have less of a reason to exit.
> >
>
> I think it’s unacceptable if malleability is not fixed in main chain, for 3 reasons:
>
> 1. a solution is *already* available and tested for > 1 year.
>
> 2. the deactivation design (which I think is an interesting idea) makes the ext block unsuitable for long-term storage of value.
>
> 3. LN over main chain allows instant exchange of main coin and xcoin without going through the ugly 2-way-peg process.
>
>
>

--
Christopher Jeffrey (JJ) <chjjeffrey@gmail.com>
CTO & Bitcoin Menace, purse.io
https://github.com/chjj

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Re: [bitcoin-dev] Extension block proposal by Jeffrey et al

[Johnson Lau]

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To make it completely transparent to unupgraded wallets, the return outputs have to be sent to something that is non-standard today, i.e. not P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, bare multi-sig, and (with BIP141) v0 P2WPKH and v0 P2WSH.

Mainchain segwit is particularly important here, as that allows atomic swap between the bitcoin and xbitcoin. Only services with high liquidity (exchanges, payment processors) would need to occasionally settle between the chains.


> On 9 May 2017, at 08:56, Christopher Jeffrey <chjj@purse.io> wrote:
> 
> Johnson,
> 
> Yeah, I do still see the issue. I think there are still some reasonable
> ways to mitigate it.
> 
> I've started revising the extension block specification/code to coexist
> with mainchain segwit. I think the benefit of this is that we can
> require exiting outputs to only be witness programs. Presumably segwit
> wallets will be more likely to be aware of a new output maturity rule
> (I've opened a PR[1] which describes this in greater detail). I think
> this probably reduces the likelihood of the legacy wallet issue,
> assuming most segwit-supporting wallets would implement this rule before
> the activation of segwit.
> 
> What's your opinion on whether this would have a great enough effect to
> prevent the legacy wallet issue? I think switching to witness programs
> only may be a good balance between fungibility and backward-compat,
> probably better all around than creating a whole new
> addr-type/wit-program just for exits.
> 
> [1] https://github.com/tothemoon-org/extension-blocks/pull/16 <https://github.com/tothemoon-org/extension-blocks/pull/16>
> 


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Re: [bitcoin-dev] Extension block proposal by Jeffrey et al

[Christopher Jeffrey]

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> To make it completely transparent to unupgraded wallets, the return outputs have to be sent to something that is non-standard today, i.e. not P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, bare multi-sig, and (with BIP141) v0 P2WPKH and v0 P2WSH.

Johnson,

I feel that's not as much of an issue with v0 witness programs. Segwit
isn't activated yet, and segwit-capable wallets aren't as widely
deployed for production. Not to mention, they're all going to require
further development anyway: the address serialization for witness
programs only became a BIP this week. No segwit wallets should ever be
planning to receive money to naked witness programs right now, since
addresses are for it aren't even available.

I think we have the benefit of timing here. The state of segwit wallet
development incidentally creates a window of time where this maturity
rule can be implemented.

On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 01:56:28AM +0800, Johnson Lau wrote:
> To make it completely transparent to unupgraded wallets, the return outputs have to be sent to something that is non-standard today, i.e. not P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, bare multi-sig, and (with BIP141) v0 P2WPKH and v0 P2WSH.
>
> Mainchain segwit is particularly important here, as that allows atomic swap between the bitcoin and xbitcoin. Only services with high liquidity (exchanges, payment processors) would need to occasionally settle between the chains.
>
>
> > On 9 May 2017, at 08:56, Christopher Jeffrey <chjj@purse.io> wrote:
> >
> > Johnson,
> >
> > Yeah, I do still see the issue. I think there are still some reasonable
> > ways to mitigate it.
> >
> > I've started revising the extension block specification/code to coexist
> > with mainchain segwit. I think the benefit of this is that we can
> > require exiting outputs to only be witness programs. Presumably segwit
> > wallets will be more likely to be aware of a new output maturity rule
> > (I've opened a PR[1] which describes this in greater detail). I think
> > this probably reduces the likelihood of the legacy wallet issue,
> > assuming most segwit-supporting wallets would implement this rule before
> > the activation of segwit.
> >
> > What's your opinion on whether this would have a great enough effect to
> > prevent the legacy wallet issue? I think switching to witness programs
> > only may be a good balance between fungibility and backward-compat,
> > probably better all around than creating a whole new
> > addr-type/wit-program just for exits.
> >
> > [1] https://github.com/tothemoon-org/extension-blocks/pull/16 <https://github.com/tothemoon-org/extension-blocks/pull/16>
> >
>

--
Christopher Jeffrey (JJ) <chjjeffrey@gmail.com>
CTO & Bitcoin Menace, purse.io
https://github.com/chjj

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