On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 9:49 AM, Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@exmulti.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 12:45 PM, Peter Vessenes <peter@coinlab.com> wrote:
> The proposal is simple, and it's a small change for miners, I imagine.
>
> My question is: why?
>
> I worry about stuffing too many requirements on the coinbase. I suppose
> the coinbase is easily extendible if we run out of bytes, but I think I'd
> like to see some more discussion / good / bad type cases for making this
> change. What do we get over just the prev_hash by doing this?

With the existing setup (sans height in coinbase), you might not have
unique transactions, with all that entails.

Yes, I've experienced that myself, actually.
 
> Anyway, some background would be great; if I missed it, I'm happy to go
> read up, but I didn't see any links on the wiki.

Gavin wrote some notes on upgrades and BIP16 lessons-learned at
https://gist.github.com/2355445

This is a super coherent and excellent writeup. I may come back with more thoughts, I want to let it percolate. Thanks! 
--
Jeff Garzik
exMULTI, Inc.
jgarzik@exmulti.com



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