Not sure whether this rises to the level of a BIP or not, as it is largely an implementation change.
One of my From-Day-One complaints about bitcoin is that transactions behavior could be far more deterministic (predictable), from a user standpoint. Transactions in the current system can easily remain in limbo forever. One big step in making transactions behave more predictably would be to remove transactions from the memory pool, if they have not made it into a block for a couple days. i.e. 1. N = 1 or 2 or whatever the community prefers. Ideally enough time for a third-tier miner, mining strange TXs, finds a block. 2. H1 = height of block chain, when a TX is received 3. H2 = H1 + (144 * N) 4. If block chain height reaches H2, and TX has not made it into a block, drop TX from memory pool Although this only impacts a small amount of TX's ultimately, what it does do is give us the ability -- once miners have upgraded to this rule -- to tell bitcoin users that their transactions "expire" after N days. Backwards compatibility should not be an issue; clients are free to retransmit their TX at any time, as usual, thereby "resetting the clock" for all peers who have forgotten the TX in question. Once in place, clients may then implement code that notices a TX has expired (read: likely to have been forgotten by the network, assuming they themselves have stopped retransmitting it). Then you can start working on wallet/coin recovery, perhaps resending with a higher fee etc. The above change is not really "fill-or-kill" but it should be a big step, opening the door to deterministic TX behavior. -- Jeff Garzik exMULTI, Inc. jgar...@exmulti.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ For Developers, A Lot Can Happen In A Second. Boundary is the first to Know...and Tell You. Monitor Your Applications in Ultra-Fine Resolution. Try it FREE! http://p.sf.net/sfu/Boundary-d2dvs2 _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
