Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] deterministic transaction expiration

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2014 08:42:08 -0700

On 6 August 2014 08:17:02 GMT-07:00, Christian Decker <[email-masked]> wrote:
>+1 for the new field, overloading fields with new meaning is definitely
>not
>a good idea.

To add a new field the best way to do it is create a new, parallel, tx format where fields are committed by merkle radix tree in an extensible and provable way. You'd then commit to that tree with a mandatory OP_RETURN output in the last txout, or with a new merkle root.

Changing the tx format itself in a hard-fork is needlessly disruptive, and in this case, wastes opportunities for improvement.