This is part of the protocol upgrade for 2020-05-15, and in general it
seems to go the direction of "we did this before, lets do this again".
The spec is clear enough, but there is still a lack of questioning and
testing. The problem this attempts to fix has been neutered for years[1].
The spec states:
> The essential idea of SigChecks is to perform counting solely in the
> spending transaction, and count actual executed signature check
> operations.
This, however nobel and logical, ignores that the
check-for-being-too-costly just pulled in a UTXO lookup and the loading
of the output script from the historical chain.
The goal that we protect against CPU over-use may be reached, but the
price is a total system slowdown. You can have multiple CPUs, but the
bus to permanent storage has one, max 2 parallel pipes.
To ensure theHub stays the number one scalable node, I didn't blindly
follow the spec, while making sure that the Hub is correctly going to
follow/reject consensus violations of newly mined blocks.
As a result the implementation in Flowee the Hub:
* does not check sigcheck-counts on historical blocks (more than 1000
blocks in the past).
This may increase the risk of chain-splits ever so slightly, but the cost
of disk-IO would be too high.
* No longer stores the value in the mempool, nor uses it for the
CPU-miner.
* Ties the sigcheck-limits to the user-set block-size-accept-limit.
This is contrary to the spec which mistakenly thinks that BCH has a
max block-size in the consensus rules. The effect is the same, though.
* The per-intput standardness suggestion is not implemented because
standardness checks don't currently fetch the previous outputs and
that would be too expensive to add.
* Standardness rules for the whole transaction are moved to the
mempool-acceptance logic instead. The cost would be too great
otherwise, similar to the previous point.
Again, the effect is the same as likely intented.
---
1) since the intro of the CachingTransactionSignatureChecker
This removes the attempt at magic (predicting future) component
called the fee-estimator.
The direct effect is that all transactions have as a mempool acceptance
the same minimum fee. Regardless of how full the mempool or blocks were.
This mempool-acceptance minimum fee is 0 sat/byte. (aka free)
Notice the node-wide free-tx accept-limiter is going to avoid us getting
overloaded.
The new UnspentOutputDatabase classes are only very loosly a database, we
purely register and store unspent outputs there. But unline a DB we don't
allow modification (just insert and delete).
This replaces the coin-db (which was based on leveldb) and as first goal
this gives us a higher level of stability. The level-database was known
to give corruption issues.
Notice that users will need to do a manual reindex on first update.
This cleans up the code for sigops.
It now uses uint32_t everywhere.
It uses an atomic while counting in different threads.
I make sure that both legacy as well as p2sh sigops are counted.
TomZ