Martin Sustrik [ARCHIVE] on Nostr: 📅 Original date posted:2013-10-22 📝 Original message:On 22/10/13 09:56, Gregory ...

📅 Original date posted:2013-10-22
📝 Original message:On 22/10/13 09:56, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 12:34 AM, Martin Sustrik <sustrik at 250bpm.com> wrote:
>> There's also Security Considerations part in
>> every RFC that is pretty relevant for Bitcoin.
>
> Which would say something interesting like "If the bitcoin network
> implements inconsistent behavior in the consensus critical parts of
> the protocol the world ends. As such, conformance or _non_-conformance
> with this specification (in particular, sections 4. 5. and 6.) may be
> required for security."

In fact, yes.

In the end it boils down to saying something like: "Bitcoin is a unique
global distributed application and thus all implementations MUST support
the version of the protocol currently in use, irrespective of whether it
have been documented and/or published. This RFC is meant only for
informational purposes and is a snapshot of the protocol as to Oct 22nd
2013."

That being said, I understand the idea of not publishing the spec so
that everyone is forced to work with live data.

> A Bitcoin protocol RFC would be a great place to exercise RFC 6919
> keywords. ( http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6919 )

Heh. Haven't seen that one.

Martin