G1lius
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Bitcoin dev IRC meeting in layman's terms (2015-12-17)

Mon Dec 21, 2015 5:59 pm

Once again my attempt to summarize and explain the weekly bitcoin developer meeting in layman's terms.
Link to last weeks summarization

Disclaimer

Please bear in mind I'm not a developer so some things might be incorrect or plain wrong.
There are no decisions being made in these meetings, but since a fair amount of devs are present it's a good representation.
Copyright: Public domain


link to this week logs
Meeting minutes by meetbot


Main topics discussed where:

Replace-by-fee handling in wallets
C++11 for 0.13


Replace-by-fee (RBF) handling in wallets

- background

Currently when a node sees a transaction that spends the same output it ignores it. With RBF it replaces the current transaction in the mempool if it has a higher fee.
This allows for things like spending "stuck" transactions, adding more recipients to a transaction in order to prevent chaining, etc.

Since there are people that accept 0-confirmation transactions and this would make it extremely easy to double spend them, this is made opt-in.
The sender can choose to opt-in to RBF by changing the nSequence field of all inputs.
This is a mempool policy for the upcoming 0.12 release.
There's a good FAQ-ish post on reddit about it.

- meeting comments

The feature freeze for 0.12 is in effect since December 1, outside of bugfixes, what's in the 0.12 branch now will be released.
#7219 to make RBF policies optional (0 = never, 1 = always, 2 = opt-in) probably won't make it in 0.12.
jonasschnelli and harding request good ideas for RBF wallet policies and ways to handle this.
Android wallet bumps the fee via a click-to-bump UI (via CPFP).
Adding bumping fees is fairly simple, doing more like adding in-and outputs probably hugely complicates the current wallet.
For including in-and outputs you'd want to prepare a signed transaction with A+B and another signed transaction with just B spending from a change output created in A.
For 0.13 we like to see at least a fee bump option and some raw transaction commands to alter a wallet transaction.


- meeting conclusion

Take a look at #7062 Fix mempool limiting and replace-by-fee for PrioritiseTransaction for 0.12
Take a look at #7132 Add option to opt into full-RBF when sending funds



C++11 for 0.13

- Background

C++11 is an update of the C++ language. It offers new functionalities, an extended standard library, etc.
Zerocash had to be written with some c++11 libraries and some IBLT simulation code was written in c++11, which they want to recycle for the eventual core commit.


- Meeting comments

The outstanding build issues are dependencies compatibility and Travis' compiler.
There are concerns about the boost library as it's consensus critical. Removing boost usage (in consensus) before 0.13 removes that concern.
A risk is that we get entrenched in C++11 irreversibly and find out when 0.13 is released a large part of the userbase can't handle it.
Backports are also harder if the code starts to diverge too much.
More testing would be good, but the travis pull tester is already slow, so adding more configurations might not be good.
Possibly a 2nd free alternative to build more configurations in parallel.
Both the zero-cash and bitcoin core team want automated testing of this stuff on many platforms, which can be done by buildbot.
We can also reach out to distros for help.
Wumpus is ready to switch builds to std=c++11 as soon as travis is building/passing.


- Meeting conclusion

Everyone wants C++11 for 0.13
swtich some builds to C++11

Participants
wumpus		Wladimir J. van der Laan 
    cfields		Cory Fields  
    sipa		Pieter Wuille  
    jonasshnelli	Jonas Schnelli  
    petertodd	Peter Todd  
    Luke-Jr		Luke Dashjr  
    nwilcox 	Nathan Wilcox     
    zookolaptop	Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn  
    sdaftuar	Suhas Daftuar  
    harding		David A. Harding  
    jgarzik		Jeff Garzik  
    btcdrak 	btcdrak
Comic relief

19:03	petertodd	wumpus: is the RBFhandling in the v0.12 branch what's going to be released? IE, have we feature frozen?  
    19:04	wumpus		yes, we have feature frozen at dec 1  
    19:04	petertodd	cool  
    19:04	petertodd	or I should say, frozen
( •_•)
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YYYYYYYEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH

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CryptAxe
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Re: Bitcoin dev IRC meeting in layman's terms (2015-12-17)

Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:11 am

You explained the C++11 stuff just fine, but a bit more info for those wondering why that isn't an obvious change to make without debate:

Some people think that the C++ version 11 ( C++11), the 11 coming from August 2011 when the standard was finalized, has useful features beneficial to developers. Others, 'purists' or something similar become irate whenever any change at all to the C++ standard is proposed let alone implemented by a huge number of developers. Remind you of the scaling debates? ;)

C++11 actually isn't even the newest version of C++, the C++14 standard was published in March of 2014. I personally think that the benefits of adopting 11 (easier / more efficient development) outweigh the negatives. The most important issue to me being that C++11 code can look a little weird for a C programmer and it does mean more work for someone that hasn't learned all of the new stuff yet (and some of it actually is pretty weird and may feel scripting-language-ish).
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G1lius
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Re: Bitcoin dev IRC meeting in layman's terms (2015-12-17)

Tue Dec 22, 2015 2:14 pm

The only objections I've read are mainly boost related as there are some compatibility issues, not really against the language itself (although I haven't read everything, people have been talking about C++11 for a long time).

But yeah, my knowledge about those things is very limited.

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LiteCoinGuy
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Re: Bitcoin dev IRC meeting in layman's terms (2015-12-17)

Tue Dec 22, 2015 2:25 pm

this was a short one - thanks G1lius :)
********************************************
More informations about Bitcoin and scaling BTC on

bitcoin.org/en/

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/c ... reases-faq

&
reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/

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CryptAxe
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Re: Bitcoin dev IRC meeting in layman's terms (2015-12-17)

Wed Dec 23, 2015 6:10 am

The only objections I've read are mainly boost related as there are some compatibility issues, not really against the language itself (although I haven't read everything, people have been talking about C++11 for a long time).

But yeah, my knowledge about those things is very limited.
Oh man... don't even get me started on boost. If you aren't having compatibility issues with boost, you haven't been using boost long enough! It is a really amazing library though.
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