BitcoinTalk

Need OP_BLOCKNUMBER to allow "time" limited transactions

243
Satoshi-only
BitcoinTalk
#1
From:
ByteCoin
Subject:
Need OP_BLOCKNUMBER to allow "time" limited transactions
Date:
At the moment, if you make a payment to someone but they've wiped their wallet then the coins are irretrievably lost.
Similarly, if the network is flooded with 0.01 fee transactions and you make an urgent payment but forget to include a higher fee then you can't reissue that payment backed by the same coins but with a fee.

If you could cause the current block number to be pushed on the stack and do some maths with it then you could implement a payment that must be spent by the recipient before a certain block number is reached or else the script would allow it to be spent again by the sender for example.

I suspect that this would be a very popular transaction mechanic.

ByteCoin
BitcoinTalk
#2
From:
theymos
Subject:
Re: Need OP_BLOCKNUMBER to allow "time" limited transactions
Date:
That would be useful, but it's probably best to keep scripts stateless. Since different nodes might have different ideas about what the current blockcount is, a situation could develop where half the network considers a transaction valid and half considers it invalid. This is not good for the network.
BitcoinTalk
#3
From:
ByteCoin
Subject:
Re: Need OP_BLOCKNUMBER to allow "time" limited transactions
Date:
Quote from: theymos on November 15, 2010, 01:49:59 AM
That would be useful, but it's probably best to keep scripts stateless. Since different nodes might have different ideas about what the current blockcount is, a situation could develop where half the network considers a transaction valid and half considers it invalid. This is not good for the network.

Hmm.. If clients disagree about what the current block count is then they already disagree about whether certain transactions are valid or not and therefore the problem you mention exists already without my proposal.
Please go into more detail about why this is not good for the network.

ByteCoin
BitcoinTalk
#4
From:
theymos
Subject:
Re: Need OP_BLOCKNUMBER to allow "time" limited transactions
Date:
Quote from: ByteCoin on November 15, 2010, 02:47:30 AM
Hmm.. If clients disagree about what the current block count is then they already disagree about whether certain transactions are valid or not and therefore the problem you mention exists already without my proposal.
Please go into more detail about why this is not good for the network.

You may be right about this. Bitcoin's segmentation-fixing mechanisms would seem to keep everything in order.

A similar feature seems to already be planned. Every transaction has the currently-unused "nLockTime" field, and this bit of code exists for the UI (the text would appear in the same place as "x confirmations"):
Code:
    if (!wtx.IsFinal())
    {
        if (wtx.nLockTime < 500000000)
            return strprintf(_("Open for %d blocks"), nBestHeight - wtx.nLockTime);
        else
            return strprintf(_("Open until %s"), DateTimeStr(wtx.nLockTime).c_str());
    }

Sounds very much like what you're thinking of.
BitcoinTalk
#5
From:
theymos
Subject:
Re: Need OP_BLOCKNUMBER to allow "time" limited transactions
Date:
After investigating some more, I found that nLockTime requires in-memory transaction replacement to be re-activated for it to be useful.

Code:
if (mapNextTx.count(outpoint))
        {
            // Disable replacement feature for now
            return false;

            // Allow replacing with a newer version of the same transaction
            if (i != 0)
                return false;
            ptxOld = mapNextTx[outpoint].ptx;
            if (!IsNewerThan(*ptxOld))
                return false;
            for (int i = 0; i < vin.size(); i++)
            {
                COutPoint outpoint = vin[i].prevout;
                if (!mapNextTx.count(outpoint) || mapNextTx[outpoint].ptx != ptxOld)
                    return false;
            }
            break;
BitcoinTalk
#6
From:
satoshi
Subject:
Re: Need OP_BLOCKNUMBER to allow "time" limited transactions
Date:
We can't safely do OP_BLOCKNUMBER.  In the event of a block chain reorg after a segmentation, transactions need to be able to get into the chain in a later block.  The OP_BLOCKNUMBER transaction and all its dependants would become invalid.  This wouldn't be fair to later owners of the coins who weren't involved in the time limited transaction.

nTimeLock does the reverse.  It's an open transaction that can be replaced with new versions until the deadline.  It can't be recorded until it locks.  The highest version when the deadline hits gets recorded.  It could be used, for example, to write an escrow transaction that will automatically permanently lock and go through unless it is revoked before the deadline.  The feature isn't enabled or used yet, but the support is there so it could be implemented later.