Re: [Bitcoin-development] Error handling in payment protocol (BIP-0070 and BIP-0072)

2014-04-26 Thread Ross Nicoll
Dear Gavin, Andreas, I'd see standardisation (or at least suggested standards) for error handling as positive for consistency of user experience. I do see what you mean about over-specification, however. Thanks for the feedback, I've taken the main points and created two pull requests:

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Error handling in payment protocol (BIP-0070 and BIP-0072)

2014-04-26 Thread Ross Nicoll
I'd be very cautious of security implications of embedding files into the payment request. Even file formats one would presume safe, such as images, have had security issues (i.e. https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/ms11-006 ) Longer term I was wondering about embedding the

[Bitcoin-development] BIP0071 media type registration with IANA

2014-04-26 Thread Ross Nicoll
Dear all, Still going through the payment protocol specifications... the MIME types in BIP0071 aren't IANA registered, and honestly look unlikely to be accepted if they were submitted as-is. Latest RFC on media type registration is RFC 6838, which very strictly restricts what can go in the

Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP70: why Google Protocol Buffers for encoding?

2015-01-19 Thread Ross Nicoll
For what it's worth, there was consideration of replacing protocol buffers when modifying BIP70 to function with the altcoin I work on (changes were required anyway in eliminate any risk that payment requests could not be accidentally applied to the wrong blockchain). The eventual conclusion was

Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP70: why Google Protocol Buffers for encoding?

2015-01-25 Thread Ross Nicoll
That was essentially what we did in the end, we replaced the network identifier (main/test) with the genesis block hash. The result is never going to accidentally work with Bitcoin Core (nor vice-versa), but is readily extensible to any other altcoins that want to use the specification without

Re: [Bitcoin-development] replace-by-fee v0.10.0rc4

2015-02-14 Thread Ross Nicoll
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Arriving slightly late to the discussion, apologies. Personally I wouldn't have written that patch, but I know development of hostile patches happens out of sight, and if it can be written, we have to presume it will be written eventually. I'd have

[Bitcoin-development] Re-enabling simple tx replacement

2015-01-04 Thread Ross Nicoll
Dear all, I've been looking at atomic cross-chain trading ( https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Atomic_cross-chain_trading ) between the Bitcoin and Dogecoin blockchains, and have a mostly functional prototype. However as it stands if the refund transaction is relayed before the actual spend transaction,

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Re-enabling simple tx replacement

2015-01-04 Thread Ross Nicoll
On 04/01/15 17:04, Gregory Maxwell wrote: On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 at 2:43 PM, Ross Nicoll j...@jrn.me.uk wrote: Dear all, I've been looking at atomic cross-chain trading ( https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Atomic_cross-chain_trading ) between the Bitcoin and Dogecoin blockchains, and have a mostly

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Re-enabling simple tx replacement

2015-01-04 Thread Ross Nicoll
On 04/01/15 17:35, Gregory Maxwell wrote: On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 at 5:22 PM, Ross Nicoll j...@jrn.me.uk wrote: Grabbing a simple test case: https://chain.so/tx/BTCTEST/f903a31f2474df737d324c60abf2407e1cf7e052844da4ccffbfab81cf6ac1f8 - that won't lock until 0028 UTC on the 5th. I've tried

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Re-enabling simple tx replacement

2015-01-04 Thread Ross Nicoll
On 04/01/15 17:44, Gregory Maxwell wrote: On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 at 5:35 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: Can you send me the actual raw transaction (that site doesn't appear have a way to get it, only some cooked json output; which doesn't include the sequence number). Nevermind,

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase

2015-05-07 Thread Ross Nicoll
I'm presuming that schedule is just an example, as you'd end up with insanely large block sizes in a few years. Absolutely, yes, an increase schedule is an option if people agree on it, and I think the better option, as the current limit too low, but jumping straight to a value big enough for

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase

2015-05-07 Thread Ross Nicoll
Can I just add my own support for this - as has been stated elsewhere in this discussion, hard forks are difficult, and risky. The earlier we have a decision, and the earlier the change goes into the code, the easier that is. Even if the decision was the actual block size change is fine to

Re: [Bitcoin-development] A suggestion for reducing the size of the UTXO database

2015-05-09 Thread Ross Nicoll
I think potential fee subsidies for cleaning up UTXO (and/or penalties for creating more UTXO than you burn) are worth thinking about. As Gavin's post ( gavinandresen.ninja/utxo-uhoh ) indicates, UTXO cost is far higher than block storage, so charging differently for the in/out mismatches

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Concerns Regarding Threats by a Developer to Remove Commit Access from Other Developers

2015-06-18 Thread Ross Nicoll
wrote: On Thursday, 18 June 2015, at 8:31 pm, Ross Nicoll wrote: I may disagree with Mike Gavin on timescale, but I do believe there's a likelihood inaction will kill Bitcoin An honest question: who is proposing inaction? I haven't seen anyone in this whole, agonizing debate arguing that 1MB

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Concerns Regarding Threats by a Developer to Remove Commit Access from Other Developers

2015-06-18 Thread Ross Nicoll
I'm struggling to illustrate how incredibly low 7 transactions per second is, not just for a payment network, but even just for a clearance network (i.e. to balance transactions between institutions and/or chains). As an example, the Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) is a

[Bitcoin-development] Error handling in payment protocol (BIP-0070 and BIP-0072)

2014-04-25 Thread J Ross Nicoll
Dear Gavin, all, Going over the payment protocol specifications, I've noticed that there's appears to be a lack of specificity on handling of error states. In most cases there are reasonably obvious solutions, however it would seem positive to formalise processes to ensure consistency. I'm

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposal: Encrypt bitcoin messages

2014-08-19 Thread J Ross Nicoll
The concern is that if you can monitor traffic in and out of a single node, you can determine which transactions originate from it vs those which it relays. That's not great, certainly, but how many nodes actually require that level of security, and surely they can use Tor or VPN services if so?