Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] Update on the Great Consensus Cleanup Revival

From: Murch <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2025 16:34:40 -0500

Thank you for the update and your work on the Great Consensus Cleanup. I 
am looking forward to reading your BIP, and would hope that you could 
share here or in the BIP’s Rationale what convinced you to change the 
grace period from 600 seconds to 7200 seconds and how the nLockTime of 
height-1 won out.

Cheers,
Murch

On 2025-02-05 13:09, 'Antoine Poinsot' via Bitcoin Development Mailing 
List wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> A bit over a year ago i started working on revisiting the 2019 Great Consensus Cleanup proposal from
> Matt Corallo [0]. His proposal included:
> - making <=64 bytes transactions invalid to fix merkle tree weaknesses;
> - making non-pushonly scriptSigs, FindAndDelete matches, OP_CODESEPARATOR and non-standard sighash
>    types fail script validation to mitigate the worst case block validation time;
> - restrict the nTime field of the first block in each difficulty adjustment interval to be no less
>    than 600 seconds lower than the previous block's;
> 
> I set out to research the impact of each of the vulnerabilities this intended to patch, the
> alternative fixes possible for each and finally if there was any other protocol bug fix we'd want to
> include if we went through the considerable effort of soft forking Bitcoin already.
> 
> Later in March i shared some first findings on Delving [1] and advertized the effort on this mailing
> list [2]. I also created a companion thread on Delving, kept private, to discuss the details of the
> worst case block validation time [3]. As one would expect due to the larger design space available
> to fix this issue, this private thread is where most of the discussion would happen. Thank you to
> everyone who contributed feedback, insights, ideas and argumented opinions on the different issues
> all along the process.
> 
> Now i would like to update the broader Bitcoin development community on the outcome of this effort.
> I believe a Consensus Cleanup proposal should include the following.
> - A fix for vulnerabilities surrounding the use of timestamps in the difficulty adjustment
>    algorithm.  In particular, a fix for the timewarp attack with a 7200 seconds grace period as well
>    as a fix for the Murch-Zawy attack [4] by making invalid any difficulty adjustment period with a
>    negative duration.
> - A fix for long block validation times with a minimal "confiscation surface", by introducing a
>    per-transaction limit on the number of legacy sigops in the inputs.
> - A fix for merkle tree weaknesses by making transactions which serialize to exactly 64 bytes
>    invalid.
> - A fix for duplicate transactions to supplement BIP34 in order to avoid resuming unnecessary BIP30
>    validation in the future. This is achieved by mandating the nLockTime field of coinbase
>    transaction to be set to the height of their block minus 1.
> 
> I have started drafting a BIP draft with the detailed specs for this.
> 
> Antoine Poinsot
> 
> 
> [0] https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/bips/blob/7f9670b643b7c943a0cc6d2197d3eabe661050c2/bip-XXXX.mediawiki
> [1] https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/great-consensus-cleanup-revival/710
> [2] https://groups.google.com/g/bitcoindev/c/CAfm7D5ppjo/m/bYJ3BiOuAAAJ
> [3] https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/worst-block-validation-time-inquiry/711
> [4] https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/zawy-s-alternating-timestamp-attack/1062#variant-on-zawys-attack-2
> 

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