Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Signet

From: Karl-Johan Alm <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2019 09:43:43 +0900

Hi Matt,

On Sat, Mar 9, 2019 at 5:20 AM Matt Corallo <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> To make testing easier, it may make sense to keep the existing block header format (and PoW) and instead apply the signature rules to some field in the coinbase transaction. This means SPV clients (assuming they only connect to honest/trusted nodes) work as-is.

Keeping the PoW rule and moving the signature would mean DoS attacks
would be trivial as anyone could mine blocks without a signature in
them, unless you ramped up the difficulty, which would mean it's just
another testnet. It's a test network, admittedly, but I think it would
kind of defeat the purpose.

> A previous idea regarding reorgs (that I believe Greg came up with) is to allow multiple keys to sign blocks, with one signing no reorgs and one signing a reorg every few blocks, allowing users to choose the behavior they want.

Not sure how this would work in practice. The idea with signet is to
have an actual network that is occasionally reorged, i.e. it's a
global network (for those participating) that everyone agrees on. Not
sure how you would have choices there.