The draft Genesis specification was published in December 2019 in order to elicit feedback from Bitcoin SV miners and other ecosystem participants. This process has resulted in much valuable feedback and discussions between the Bitcoin SV team and other actors in the Bitcoin SV ecosystem. As a result we are now ready to update the specification and designate it as stable.
As previously indicated the prohibition on the P2SH (pay-to-script-hash) script pattern has been upgraded from a default local miner policy to a consensus rule. Following further feedback from miners and other actors it has been decided that the change to enable use of the original sighash algorithm is premature and to revert that change with a view to implementing it at a later time.
Whilst not part of the Genesis specification an additional change has been introduced to ensure the Bitcoin SV Node software cannot be started without explicitly setting the config parameters: “excessiveblocksize”, otherwise known as the block size “hard cap”, and “maxstackmemoryusageconsensus”. It will still be possible to set these values to unlimited however the user of the software will be required to actively make this decision in order to start the node.
The Genesis specification has been updated and is available here. Bitcoin SV node software has now entered code freeze and internal QA and we anticipate a stable release incorporating all of the above changes to be released on Tuesday 14th January 2020. Following this release we urge anyone running the Bitcoin SV node software to upgrade as soon as practical in anticipation of the Genesis activation on February 4th 2020.
