Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by xiphias2 2701 days ago
It looks interesting, but I believe even verifying 100-200 lines in the real Bitcoin consensus code is more useful. All the Bitcoin Core developers know that the Bitcoin implementation is a mess, but they understood that it's just not going away. As for Bitcoin script, there's a plan to upgrade it to Simplicity (https://blockstream.com/simplicity.pdf), but even then, the old code will stay (there's a concensus that there won't be any hard forks for a long time unless it's really needed).

The last bug was in the caching code (a transaction could slip twice in a block which could lead to inflation), and it was something that only formal verification of inflation in the current code would catch.

My biggest worry is with digital signatures in the Bitcoin blockchain: if there's a bug in it, it's over, building trust again is extremely hard.