Great news! Pay-to-PubKeyHash Functionality Added
https://www.counterparty.co/pay-to-pubkeyhash-functionality-added/
https://www.counterparty.co/pay-to-pubkeyhash-functionality-added/
Sorry if this sounds like a dumb question but I don't understand the implications - what does " it will be enabled on mainnet with block 293000" really mean since bare multi-sig is still the default method used going forward at least in the near future. Is the protocol capable of automatically switching to pubkeyhash if it fails to create a bare multisig transaction and relay it successfully.
It means the protocol will parse this kind of encoded transactions from block 293000, but it does not mean the client will encode in this way.
Ah that makes sense
I don't see this as a threat as you state, even if the protocol is capable of parsing it, the client is not yet sending this transaction. This ensures continuity for XCP in the short term, its a business continuity plan in an adverse situation that has not been triggered. Hopefully saner heads will prevail. In the meantime, XCP has a way forward even if the situation deteriorates from where we stand currently.
PP has always been against creating transactions with unspendable outputs. It looks like the devs are looking after worse case scenarios, nothing more than that. If counterwallet were to start sending these messages, I would agree with everything you are saying. But we are not there yet and hopefully will not be.
The intent of introducing pay to pubkeyhash encoding is, as stated above, for a worst-case scenario. We will never use this kind of encoding by default, and it will only be as a last resort if we have no other viable alternatives. I suspect that if things ever did get to that point with Bitcoin, we would also strongly be considering a different block chain as well. We are hopeful this situation would never have to happen, but this provides an assurance to investors and people that use the Counterparty network to build and transfer value that it won't just 'disappear' overnight.
Thanks for the explanation.
I wonder though what was the logic in declaring this publicly. Since it is a last resort of sort.
I (want to) assume that there is some line of communications between you guys and the BTC devs. I am sure not all liked the language and attitude of Luke jr. etc. PP was going to PM Mike Hearn etc.
So it seems that this announcement might be counterproductive no?
Creating unspendable outputs is hardly the worst thing in the world. It happens every time someone loses a private key. Even if Counterparty created a thousand of them for every one of its transactions, it would still be adding enormous value to Bitcoin. All concerns about storing data in the blockchain are ideological, not practical; encoding in spendable (or better yet provably prunable) outputs is merely ideal, and there are a lot of things about Bitcoin's design, for instance, that are very, very far from that standard.
