Notes / short topics

Jonasschnelli created a draft video for the 2016 Git visualization.

Main topics

fork warning system repair

0.14 review priorities

fork warning system repair

background

The large-work fork warning system, which should warn users if a fork with enough proof-of-work continues to be mined, is currently broken under header first validation.

Jl2012 is working on a fix for this.

Jl2012 elaborates this is more than a fix, in that it stores valid headers under an invalid block as long as there’s valid PoW and valid nTime.

Gmaxwell has doubts about the utility of the warning system: there’s been too many false warnings and it wasn’t used usefully by most to begin with. BlueMatt notes having a reliable warning system is the first step towards fixing the trust in the system.

Sipa wonders if we need a detection of internal consensus errors like database corruption, CPU overheating, etc., because 99.99% of all fork warnings that are seen in practice are just broken nodes.

No one is making the argument for this change to be important for 0.14

meeting conclusion

Focus more on the 0.14 critical changes

0.14 review priorities

background

Bitcoin Core 0.14 is scheduled to be released around March 2017. Open pull request aimed for 0.14 are tagged with a 0.14 tag.

Things people would like to see in 0.14 if review effort wasn’t a bottleneck:

Wumpus would like to see named arguments.

BlueMatt thinks parallel ProcessMessages would be a huge improvement for some use cases, but if there’s not enough time to review it he’ll skip it for 0.14.

Jtimon hopes to get custom blockchains in, but wonders how realistic that is. For efficiency this optimization might help, but nobody has found time to benchmark it.

Luke-jr notes there was some desire for the multiwallet PR’s (#8775 and #8694), and ignore/override rejections but they’re not tagged with the 0.14 milestone.

Morcos would like to see the block relay improvements (#9375, #9441 and #9447) and possibly parallel ProcessMessages going in. #9441 has a lot of commits, but most of them are very tiny to make review easier.

Gmaxwell was hoping to see the multiwallet support go in (PR’s #8775 and #8694) and the UTXO scriptpubkey index, although the latter looks to be abandoned by its requester. Also the CreateTransaction change from Morcos which fixes some concerning fee overpayment corner case would be nice.

Jonasschnelli thinks HD chain split should also go into 0.14, plus some form of HD rescan.

There’s already a lot of stuff to do, and there’s at least 4 regressions which are 0.14-blocking (issues #9479, #9027, #9148 and #9212). Morcos notes if #9371 (fixing issue #9479) won’t make it in 0.14 we need to revert #9240.

meeting conclusion

Focus on fee fixes (#9404), net locks overhaul (#9441), named arguments (#8811),early compact block relay (#9375, #9441 and #9447) and in lower priority the multiwallet changes (#8775 and #8694).

Comic relief

jonasschnelli Fun topic: 2016 Git Visualisation: I'd created a draft video, need feedback to overhaul it and place it on the bitcoincore.org website. jonasschnelli https://vimeo.com/198242328 jonasschnelli Password coredev jonasschnelli (will be there for a couple of mins) luke-jr jonasschnelli: why password protect it and post the password in public? :P jonasschnelli Security by obscurity. petertodd luke-jr: MILITARY LEVEL BLOCKCHAIN SECURITY

Participants

Disclaimer

This summary was compiled without input from any of the participants in the discussion, so any errors are the fault of the summary author and not the discussion participants.