[Bitcoin-development] deterministic transaction expiration

Wed Aug 6 17:20:25 UTC 2014

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On 6 August 2014 09:31:24 GMT-07:00, Mark Friedenbach <mark at monetize.io> wrote:
>I highly doubt that is the best approach.
>
>If this nExpiry field is a consensus rule, then the Merkle tree or the
>appropriate paths through needs to be included with the transaction as
>part of the network and on-disk data structures, so that proper
>validation can be done. This would be both more disruptive and less
>efficient than simply adding an nExpiry field to the transaction
>format,
>as we do in Freimarkets.

The general case doesn't require transmission of any merkle data; it is derived from the tx data. Equally changing a data format is certainly: note how Freimarkets has no third-party library support because you've made it incompatible with the standard Bitcoin data structures. Merkle radix tree formatting OTOH is just a cryptographically committed extension of the tag-value concept seen in protobuf, among others.

re: efficiency, we need fundamental improvements in efficiency, not little micro-optimisations everywhere done at high cost to maintainability.

re: validation, note how the merkle radix tree meets that need by allowing the absence of data to be proven.

>If the field is pre-consensus (a mempool gentleman's agreement), then
>it
>has no business in the transaction structure at all and should be
>packaged in some sort of envelope container.

It's also rather useless without consensus. Expiry is only useful if it is a guarantee, if not you might as well just implement tx replacement directly.