• Gregory Maxwell's avatar
    Introduce assumevalid setting to skip presumed valid scripts. · b7c9f564
    Gregory Maxwell authored
    This disentangles the script validation skipping from checkpoints.
    
    A new option is introduced "assumevalid" which specifies a block whos
     ancestors we assume all have valid scriptsigs and so we do not check
     them when they are also burried under the best header by two weeks
     worth of work.
    
    Unlike checkpoints this has no influence on consensus unless you set
     it to a block with an invalid history.  Because of this it can be
     easily be updated without risk of influencing the network consensus.
    
    This results in a massive IBD speedup.
    
    This approach was independently recommended by Peter Todd and Luke-Jr
     since POW based signature skipping (see PR#9180) does not have the
     verifiable properties of a specific hash and may create bad incentives.
    
    The downside is that, like checkpoints, the defaults bitrot and older
     releases will sync slower.  On the plus side users can provide their
     own value here, and if they set it to something crazy all that will
     happen is more time will be spend validating signatures.
    
    Checkblocks and checklevel are also moved to the hidden debug options:
     Especially now that checkblocks has a low default there is little need
     to change these settings, and users frequently misunderstand them as
     influencing security or IBD speed.  By hiding them we offset the
     space added by this new option.
    b7c9f564
release-notes.md 5.35 KB