Do you remember christmas Steve Shadders, CTO of nChain CTO and SV Node Lead Developer, let us all know that the last important piece of the puzzle in BSV’s scaling dominance was saved as a Christmas present for Bitcoin SV users, and we were all excited! But the celebration may have been a little premature.
The “ancestral limit” prior to the previous node release would only spend 50 “children” on an unconfirmed “parent” transaction – which is nowhere near enough for long twetch threads about Jesus and Flat Earth, all tossing $ SHUA coins on the REX day or monkey in the Gorilla DAO with the proceeds from trading in $ tendies. Beautiful new world…
Maybe brother. May be. (Source: Twetch)
Earlier this year the limit was raised to 1,000 transactions, with Shadders encouraging miners to adopt the change quickly and try to lift the limit altogether. During the celebration, many people were excited to use the applications that had been waiting for the change. One of the most anticipated uses of this version was FYX Gaming’s CryptoFights, which was designed from the ground up to use Bitcoin SV transactions for every aspect of the game. Unfortunately, within days of its release, it turned out that CryptoFights needed even more subordinate transactions as the basic gameplay would hit the new ancestral limit in three to five rounds of the game – which required a large block confirmation to proceed, which was a huge downside about the user experience of the game.
After celebrating the release, having to step back to the drawing board to try again to come up with a solution was a huge disappointment.
Enter SV Node Version 1.0.8
“But Kurt, isn’t the protocol set in stone?”
YES. Software is NOT a protocol. These changes do not change the Bitcoin rules, nor the consensus rules, and there is nothing but changes to the Miner’s Policy Settings. There are a number of important (and some more detailed) changes to this version. The ancestor limit has been increased 10 times to 10,000 transactions. Again Shadders noticed the desire to remove this limit altogether as soon as possible!
Almost immediately after it was released, CryptoFights lead developer David Case went to Twitter to express his desire for BSV’s honest nodes to adopt the new version. If you remember, the Node team is working on behalf of the Bitcoin Association to suggest software changes. However, it is up to each node on the network to do the upgrade. This is usually a coordination exercise, as having too many versions of the software trying to reach consensus can increase the risk of divisions, orphans, or other problems.
Bitcoin SV block maker … Please update to 1.0.8 as soon as possible!
Many Thanks,
¯_ (tsu) _ / ¯
– David Case u / 114 @ 114 (@shruggr) May 12, 2021
With this new version, resource hungry applications like CryptoFights should be able to make their full debut with no practical limits, and we should start seeing some very large blocks! When asked to comment, Case said, “… this was the last boundary in mining software that blocked real interactivity between objects in the chain. After fixing it and fixing the previous bugs, we can finally move CryptoFights to the mainnet! “
This is HUGE news as FYX Gaming is expected to bring a tidal wave of users to the network and take advantage of BSV’s exclusive superlatives to a very important extent.
What else was in the updates?
The new RPC call “getmerkleproof2” has been added to facilitate the implementation of SPV. New double spending warning tools were also released, presumably prepared to prepare for an increased volume of small payments, and there was also a range of household chores related to changing the ancestral limit.
One strange change is the addition of a dust return script, which has been added as a new default transaction type. According to the publication:
“With this new type of transaction, miners can donate dust to miners via fees to counter attacks on the dusting of wallets. This is more economical for the network, as it frees the wallets and UTXO databases from expenses that are otherwise practically impossible to spend. While the incentive to conduct dust attacks in the first place is completely removed. “
That’s all well and good, but as I understand it, every “OP_FALSE OP_RETURN” already does this with standard validation rules. Before that, however, a user could also do the occasional consolidation transactions and keep their own dust for a small fee. Shadders was kind enough to explain the thought process behind the change. It turns out that the change is specifically focused on privacy and reducing the risk of doping users with dust attacks.
He explained, “There are still fees for normal op-return transactions. So if the dust isn’t enough to pay the fee, you’d have to add another input to cover the fee, which is exactly what the attacker wants. “
“Consolidation might be another option, but you’d have to join the dust and wait until you got enough to meet the stricter criteria (which you may never do if it’s a one-off attack).”
“Dust recirculation can be done instantly with a dust inlet and is much easier to implement in a user wallet.”
Get ready to see big blocks full of long chains of transactions, big blockers! Because we will see another big step when complex applications find their way into the main network!
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