Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] OP_CODESEPARATOR Re: BIP Proposal: The Great Consensus Cleanup

From: "Russell O'Connor" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2019 13:49:33 -0400

Hi Jacob,

> Huh?! The whole point of non-standardness in this context is to (a) make
>>> soft-forking something out safer by derisking miners not upgrading right
>>> away and (b) signal something that may be a candidate for soft-forking
>>> out so that we get feedback. Who is getting things disabled who isn't
>>> bothering to *tell* people that their use-case is being hurt?!
>>>
>>
>> People have told me that they are hurt by some other non-standardness
>> changes and I understand that they have been sitting on those funds for
>> years.  Maybe they don't realize their is some place to complain or maybe
>> they think there must be a good reason why they are not allowed to do what
>> they were previously allowed to do.  Perhaps others don't want to risk
>> blowing their pseudonymity.  Perhaps they think that attempting to undo
>> some of these non-standardness changes is futile.  I can bring up the
>> specific cases I've encountered in a new thread if you think it is
>> worthwhile.
>>
>
> Like Matt, I understand non-standardness to be specifically for making a
> transaction type more difficult to set the stage for a future disabling.
>
> If anyone is actually harmed by this change, let them at least speak up
> pseudonymously as others have before.  Backwards compatibility shouldn't
> mean letting imaginary implausible cases veto net-beneficial changes.
>

It is so easy to say stuff like this when one's own money isn't what is at
risk.

While I encourage users who would be harmed to chime in if they can,
unfortunately, I think it is mostly wishful thinking on our part that they
necessarily would.  In fact, there is evidence that in practice people
don't.

To illustrate this, consider the example of the people affected by PR #5247
<https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5247>, which makes unparsable
public keys non-standard.  As far as I am aware none have commented on this
mailing list about it yet even though I happen to know such people do exist
because I've talked with them on Slack.  I believe the person I spoke with
to took over a year (and probably more than two years) to even notice that
the transactions they want to redeem with are no longer standard.  To be
fair, their money that is stuck due to PR #5247 isn't lost yet, but I'm
skeptical they would think or know to speak up here even if their money was
on the chopping block.  The fact that they haven't been able to move their
money in the last *4 years* doesn't mean they wouldn't like it back one day.

While non-standardness is a helpful in dissuading users from committing new
funds to OP_CODESEPARATOR scripts, it doesn't do anything to help users
that may have been caught unaware by the non-standardness change.
Furthermore, because these transactions are non-standard, anyone caught off
guard by the change is going to have a very hard time redeeming their
funds, as we have already seen with PR #5247, a non-standardness change
that is far older than the OP_CODESERPATOR change in PR #11423
<https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/11423>.