I propose to allow miners to voluntarily lock funds by letting miners add additional inputs to the coinbase transaction. Currently the coinbase transaction does not allow any real input to be added (only a pseudo-input). This is a hard-fork, and we could include it the next time a hardfork is made. The modifications to the code are minimal (no more than 12 lines modified where IsCoinBase() is called), and they generally involve removing code, not adding.
Why ? Because sometime in the future (maybe 5-10 years) we may have to deal with problems of securing the blockchain, as the subsidy is lowered. We don't want the number of confirmation blocks to be increased in compensation because Bitcoin won't be able to compete with other payment networks. Then by having this hardfork now, we will be able to soft-fork later to any rule we may came come up with involving deposit bonds, proof-of-stake, and the penalization of double-mining (mining two blocks at the same height) to prevent short-range attacks. Can it hurt? No. I doesn't not change the incentives or the security in any way, as adding additional inputs to the coinbase transaction would be voluntary until the time for a soft-fork comes. We shouldn't hard-fork for this change only, but maybe we could do this change when the next hard-fork is scheduled (when we increase the block size?). Regards, S. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming! The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development