Re: [bitcoin-dev] Year 2038 problem and year 2106 chain halting

[ZmnSCPxj <ZmnSCPxj@protonmail.com>]

Good morning yanmaani,


> It's well-known. Nobody really cares, because it's so far off. Not
> possible to do by softfork, no.

I think it is possible by softfork if we try hard enough?


> 1.  The block timestamp may not be lower than the median of the last 11
>     blocks'
>
> 2.  The block timestamp may not be greater than the current time plus two
>     hours
>
> 3.  The block timestamp may not be greater than 2^32 (Sun, 07 Feb 2106
>     06:28:16 +0000)

What happens if a series of blocks has a timestamp of 0xFFFFFFFF at the appropriate time?

In that case:

1.  Is not violated, since "not lower than" means "greater than or equal to", and after a while the median becomes 0xFFFFFFFF and 0xFFFFFFFF == 0xFFFFFFFF
2.  Is not violated, since it would be a past actual real time.
3.  Is not violated since 0xFFFFFFFF < 0x100000000.

In that case, we could then add an additional rule, which is that a 64-bit (or 128-bit, or 256-bit) timestamp has to be present in the coinbase transaction, with similar rules except translated to 64-bit/128-bit/256-bit.

Possibly a similar scheme could be used for `nLockTime`; we could put a 64-bit `nLockTime64` in that additional signed block in Taproot SegWit v1 if the legacy v`nLockTime` is at the maximum seconds-timelock possible.

Regards,
ZmnSCPxj