I'm hoping this fits under the moderation rule of "short-term changes to the Bitcoin protcol" (I'm not exactly clear on what is meant by "short-term"; it would be lovely if the moderators would start a thread on bitcoin-discuss to clarify that): Should it be a requirement that ANY one-megabyte transaction that is valid under the existing rules also be valid under new rules? Pro: There could be expensive-to-validate transactions created and given a lockTime in the future stored somewhere safe. Their owners may have no other way of spending the funds (they might have thrown away the private keys), and changing validation rules to be more strict so that those transactions are invalid would be an unacceptable confiscation of funds. Con: It is extremely unlikely there are any such large, timelocked transactions, because the Core code has had a clear policy for years that 100,000-byte transactions are "standard" and are relayed and mined, and larger transactions are not. The requirement should be relaxed so that only valid 100,000-byte transaction under old consensus rules must be valid under new consensus rules (larger transactions may or may not be valid). I had to wrestle with that question when I implemented BIP101/Bitcoin XT when deciding on a limit for signature hashing (and decided the right answer was to support any "non-attack"1MB transaction; see https://bitcoincore.org/~gavin/ValidationSanity.pdf for more details). -- -- Gavin Andresen