On Sunday, December 20, 2020 9:37 PM, Karl-Johan Alm via bitcoin-dev <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thanks a lot for taking the time to brush up the BIP. For what it's > worth, I am all for these changes, and I see them as clear > improvements all around. > > IIRC Pieter was the one who originally suggested the two-checks > approach (invalid, inconclusive, valid) which is being modified here, > so would be good if you chimed in (or not -- which I'll assume means > you don't mind). I agree with the idea of permitting incomplete validators to return inconclusive as well. That doesn't really reduce the functionality (given that "inconclusive" was already a potential result), and it obviously makes it much more accessible to a variety of software. This suggestion breaks the original use of inconclusive though: the ability to detect that future features are used in the signature. The idea was to use divergence between "consensus valid" and "standardness valid" as a proxy for future extensions to be detected (e.g. OP_NOPn, future witness versions, ...). I think it's undesirable that these things now become unconditionally invalid (until the BIP is updated, but once that happens old validators will give a different result than new ones). Since the BIP no longer relies on a nebulous concept of standardness, and instead specifically defines which standardness features are to be considered, this seems easy to fix: whenever validation fails due to any of those, require reporting inconclusive instead of invalid (unless of course something actually invalid also happens). In practice I guess you'd implement that (in capable validators) by still doing validation twice, once with all features enabled that distinguish between valid/invalid, and if valid, again but now with the features enabled that distinguish between valid and (invalid or inconclusive). Cheers, -- Pieter _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
