From: Michael Folkson <michaelfolkson@protonmail•com>
To: Bitcoin Protocol Discussion <bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: [bitcoin-dev] Transcript: Carl Dong on libbitcoinkernel
Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2022 16:25:26 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <DdbNuLWzpRa14VuJ2C5Uzswt_1P2qyWeRlbLqjrkKEzyJxCMzjNZ2FcFXjPMJ15cRSKczYfkG2KC5tmTlqXLP8h4-WO5vLao0x_W35KHBwE=@protonmail.com> (raw)
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1723 bytes --]
Hi
Another transcript that may be of interest to this list. Carl Dong recently did an excellent short video explaining the libbitcoinkernel project in Bitcoin Core. The transcript is here:
https://btctranscripts.com/chaincode-labs/2022-04-12-carl-dong-libbitcoinkernel/
As he explains in the video libbitcoinkernel is the latest attempt to extract the consensus engine out of Bitcoin Core. There are many motivations for doing this. Obviously disagreements between the consensus engines of nodes across the network can lead to catastrophic forks. This boundary between what is part of consensus and what is not has occasionally been blurred in the past and for the most security critical part of Bitcoin Core (and Bitcoin generally) this is clearly unacceptable. This is not a criticism of anyone in the past, unravelling Satoshi's spaghetti code and the entanglement between the consensus engine and the rest of the codebase has been a decade long task, requires extreme care and is by no means completed.
As well as leading to some consensus bugs in older versions of Bitcoin Core, the leaky consensus abstraction has made it difficult for alternative implementations to be built in other languages and with different RPCs etc without risking falling out of consensus with Bitcoin Core.
This is clearly an ambitious long term project but the first PR in the series was recently merged [1] and Carl explains his thinking on the future direction of this project in the video and on the linked issue.
[1]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/24303
--
Michael Folkson
Email: michaelfolkson at [protonmail.com](http://protonmail.com/)
Keybase: michaelfolkson
PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3
[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 4789 bytes --]
reply other threads:[~2022-04-30 16:25 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: [no followups] expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to='DdbNuLWzpRa14VuJ2C5Uzswt_1P2qyWeRlbLqjrkKEzyJxCMzjNZ2FcFXjPMJ15cRSKczYfkG2KC5tmTlqXLP8h4-WO5vLao0x_W35KHBwE=@protonmail.com' \
--to=michaelfolkson@protonmail$(echo .)com \
--cc=bitcoin-dev@lists$(echo .)linuxfoundation.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox