On Sat, Sep 22, 2018 at 4:25 AM gb via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > > If the bugfix can be backported to earlier versions why is the
Have been backported, not merely can be. > hype/hysteria about "everybody" must immediately upgrade to 0.16.3 > currently being spread on the forums/reddit? For instructions to be effective they need to be concise. Presenting people with a complex decision tree is not a way to maximize wellfare. The few parties that would be better off on some other version already know that they have some reason to not run the latest stable, and can do more research to find out their other options. The announcement posted on the bitcoin core site, I think is adequately clear but if you see an opportunity to improve it, please make suggestions. > I don't see any effort to correct this misinformation either. It's decent advice, not misinformation. You can run the fixed earlier versions but they have other issues, I wouldn't recommend anyone run older versions generally. Reasoning about risk is complicated. For example, when people were talking about only the crash component of the issue there were some people stating "I don't care if I go down, an unlikely delay in processing payments would not be a problem." But, in fact, a network exploitable crash is pretty dangerous: an attacker can carve up the network into partitions that will produce long valid forks and reorg against each other, enabling double-spends. The best one sentence advice available is to upgrade to the latest version. You'd probably have to get up to two page explanations discussing trade-offs before it makes sense to talk about running a fixed 0.14 or what not. Theymos' language is stronger than I would have chosen, but I think it's language that errors on the side of protecting people from harm. _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
