Subject: [bitcoin-dev] We can trivially fix quadratic CHECKSIG with a simple soft-fork modifying just SignatureHash()

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2015 21:35:59 -0800

Occured to me that this hasn't been mentioned before...

We can trivially fix the quadratic CHECK(MULTI)SIG execution time issue
by soft-forking in a limitation on just SignatureHash() to only return
true if the tx size is <100KB. (or whatever limit makes sense)

This fix has the advantage over schemes that limit all txs, or try to
count sigops, of being trivial to implement, while still allowing for a
future CHECKSIG2 soft-fork that properly fixes the quadratic hashing
issue; >100KB txs would still be technically allowed, it's just that
(for now) there'd be no way for them to spend coins that are
cryptographically secured.

For example, if we had an issue with a major miner exploiting
slow-to-propagate blocks(1) to harm their competitors, this simple fix
could be deployed as a soft-fork in a matter of days, stopping the
attack quickly.

1) www.mail-archive.com/[email-masked]/msg03200.html

-- 
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
0000000000000000094afcbbad10aa6c82ddd8aad102020e553d50a60b6c678f