Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Merits 1 from 1 user
Re: Going backward in time
by
DannyHamilton
on 13/10/2021, 01:22:15 UTC
⭐ Merited by nc50lc (1)
I have another time-related question: will the chain be halted when reaching median time equal to 0xffffffff? Or maybe we have some kind of overflow bug here, as it was in Value Overflow Incident, but time-related, so is it possible to jump back from 0xffffffff to 0x00000000?

Standard unix time uses a signed 4-byte integer. If I remember correctly, Bitcoin blocks use an unsigned 4-byte integer. This allows an additional 68 years before it becomes a problem.

I'm not sure if the overflow has been addressed in code yet, but if it hasn't, then we've got about 85 more years to take care of it.