From: "'Russell O'Connor' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List" <bitcoindev@googlegroups.com>
To: Greg Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>,
Bitcoin Development Mailing List <bitcoindev@googlegroups.com>,
Antoine Poinsot <darosior@protonmail.com>
Subject: [bitcoindev] Re: Policy restrictions Was: [BIP Proposal] Limit ScriptPubkey Size >= 520 Bytes Consensus.
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2025 18:23:20 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAMZUoKmPfbwJApAeYkXs6U9Syuj4KjbcsH3aFJ7desFnHxyyTw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAMZUoKnyYpfJ1fZRan7BzyGvMitxznoSyCXkjxc2Qy5Z9pNvMA@mail.gmail.com>
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Fine, I ended up looking into it.
PR 5247 <http://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5247> changed the semantics
of STRICTENC policy in late 2014 so that during a CHECKMULTISIGVERIFY, if a
pubkey with an incorrect prefix is encountered, the script fails. The
previous behaviour was that if a pubkey was invalid, the check failed for
only that pubkey and processing continued on to the next pubkey.
I still have to go through my IRC logs, but my recollection is there is at
least one person who had their funds "soft confiscated" in the sense that
they were now, by policy only, unable to spend their UTXOs and would
require bypassing policy to retrieve their funds.
People who have better databases than me are welcome to search through bare
multisig UTXOs to see if there are any having a strict subset of malformed
pubkeys in them.
So one minor correction to my story: it wasn't a matter of the pubkey being
off-curve, but rather having an invalid prefix / invalid encoding.
On Thu, Oct 30, 2025 at 4:27 PM Russell O'Connor <roconnor@blockstream.com>
wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 30, 2025 at 2:40 AM Greg Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't even think bitcoin has ever policy restricted something that was
>> in active use, much less softforked out something like that.
>>
>
> I invite the Bitcore lore experts to correct me here, but I recall someone
> many years ago finding that their bare multisig funds (likely related to
> the Counterparty nonsense) were stuck by policy due to some new policy
> being enacted to mandate that pubkeys in bare multisigs must now all be
> on-curve points ... or something like that. I do hope that they managed to
> get their funds recovered by now with direct miner intervention.
>
> I really ought to vet my claim above by going through my IRC logs and
> Bitcoin development history ... but a quicker way is to post a claim
> publicly on the internet and wait for someone else to call it out as being
> wrong.
>
> Also, I think this type of policy change quite harmful and shouldn't be
> replicated, and ideally reverted, assuming my story is correct.
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2025-10-30 22:29 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 46+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2025-10-02 20:42 [bitcoindev] " PortlandHODL
2025-10-02 22:19 ` Andrew Poelstra
2025-10-02 22:46 ` Andrew Poelstra
2025-10-02 22:47 ` 'moonsettler' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
2025-10-03 7:11 ` Garlo Nicon
2025-10-02 22:27 ` Brandon Black
2025-10-03 1:21 ` [bitcoindev] " /dev /fd0
2025-10-03 10:46 ` 'moonsettler' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
2025-10-03 11:26 ` /dev /fd0
2025-10-03 13:35 ` jeremy
2025-10-03 13:59 ` Andrew Poelstra
2025-10-03 14:18 ` /dev /fd0
2025-10-03 14:59 ` Andrew Poelstra
2025-10-03 16:15 ` Anthony Towns
2025-10-05 9:59 ` Guus Ellenkamp
2025-10-03 13:21 ` [bitcoindev] " Peter Todd
2025-10-03 16:52 ` 'moonsettler' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
2025-10-03 15:42 ` Anthony Towns
2025-10-03 20:02 ` Luke Dashjr
2025-10-03 20:52 ` /dev /fd0
2025-10-04 23:12 ` jeremy
2025-10-05 10:59 ` Luke Dashjr
2025-10-08 15:03 ` Greg Tonoski
2025-10-08 18:15 ` Keagan McClelland
2025-10-15 20:04 ` [bitcoindev] " Casey Rodarmor
2025-10-16 0:06 ` Greg Maxwell
2025-10-17 17:07 ` Brandon Black
2025-10-17 18:05 ` 'Antoine Poinsot' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
2025-10-18 1:01 ` Antoine Riard
2025-10-18 4:03 ` Greg Maxwell
2025-10-18 12:06 ` PortlandHODL
2025-10-18 16:44 ` Greg Tonoski
2025-10-18 16:54 ` /dev /fd0
2025-10-22 8:07 ` 'moonsettler' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
2025-10-27 23:44 ` Michael Tidwell
2025-10-30 2:26 ` Greg Maxwell
2025-10-30 3:36 ` Michael Tidwell
2025-10-30 6:15 ` Greg Maxwell
2025-10-30 8:55 ` Bitcoin Error Log
2025-10-30 17:40 ` Greg Maxwell
2025-10-30 20:27 ` [bitcoindev] Policy restrictions Was: " 'Russell O'Connor' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
2025-10-30 22:23 ` 'Russell O'Connor' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List [this message]
2025-10-30 16:10 ` [bitcoindev] " Tom Harding
2025-10-30 22:15 ` Doctor Buzz
2025-10-20 15:22 ` Greg Maxwell
2025-10-21 19:05 ` Garlo Nicon
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