Revert "Revert "Add rules--presently disabled--for using GetMedianTimePast as endpoint for lock-time calculations""
This reverts commit 40cd32e835.
After careful analysis it was determined that the change was, in fact, safe and several people were suffering
momentary confusion about locktime semantics.
This reverts commit 9d55050773.
As noted by Luke-Jr, under some conditions this will accept transactions which are invalid by the network
rules. This happens when the current block time is head of the median time past and a transaction's
locktime is in the middle.
This could be addressed by changing the rule to MAX(this_block_time, MTP+offset) but this solution and
the particular offset used deserve some consideration.
The lock-time code currently uses CBlock::nTime as the cutoff point for time based locked transactions. This has the unfortunate outcome of creating a perverse incentive for miners to lie about the time of a block in order to collect more fees by including transactions that by wall clock determination have not yet matured. By using CBlockIndex::GetMedianTimePast from the prior block instead, the self-interested miner no longer gains from generating blocks with fraudulent timestamps. Users can compensate for this change by simply adding an hour (3600 seconds) to their time-based lock times.
If enforced, this would be a soft-fork change. This commit only adds the functionality on an unexecuted code path, without changing the behaviour of Bitcoin Core.
Add a field `strDebugMessage` which can be passed to DoS or Invalid,
and queried using GetDebugMessage() to add extra troubleshooting
information to the validation state.
Gregory Maxwell