Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] 0.8.1 ideas

From: Gregory Maxwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2013 13:24:50 -0700

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 1:10 PM, Matthew Mitchell
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> Why would it be a difficulty in getting people to update away from 0.7 and earlier? How long would that roughly take? If people are hesitant to update, imagine if a more serious vulnerability is found. It could be disastrous.

The development community backports critical fixes which makes
updating instead of upgrading possible, but that still is not free.
Many people are carrying patches against Bitcoin which require
integration and time for testing— even if its just an update. Small
behavior changes can still break things for the users. For example, a
major mining pool lost well over 1000 BTC when upgrading to 0.8
because the reindex interacted poorly with their pool server software
and caused them to pay people 25 BTC per share, an update or upgrade
is just a risky even whos risk can be minimized if its done at your
own pace.

Sometimes when there is a vulnerability what people will do is isolate
their production nodes from the internet using upgraded nodes, so they
avoid touching the production systems. Other times the vulnerability
is only a DOS attack so they ignore it unless the attack happens, or
only applies to something else they don't care about.

Another point is that if everyone instantly upgrades in response to
developers claim that an urgent is needed (as opposed to implementing
other workarounds) then the security of the system much more obviously
reduces to the ability to compromise a developer— something no one
should want. When roll outs take time there is more time for review to
catch things, fewer nodes harmed by an introduced flaw, etc.