declare the other wallet developers out of bounds
I declare all software that doesn't transfer all your coins to me out of bounds! I declare all software that doesn't assign me a trillion bitcoins out of bounds! Hurrah! This is fun.
... Come on. Going and dictating to people what software they could run would not be well aligned with the principals that make Bitcoin (or the internet) interesting in the first place..., particular because taking that approach to it's logical conclusion we'd rapidly reach a state where Bitcoin Core was the only or nearly only software people could use with the network (as it has an order of magnitude more development effort going into it).
such as is used to manage the IETF
I have considerable experience in the IETF, and I have to say your comment drew a bit of a chuckle from me... The IETF has no authority to control what software or behavior other parties have. You're drawing exactly the wrong comparison there.
In Bitcoin Core we discovered, designed solutions, implemented them, adjusted the behavior of our own software, specified the needed behavior, and recommended these changes to others. We've even gone out and reviewed, audited, advised, and contributed patches to other implementations. I'd say we'd done everything short of written invitations, but if you count emails-- I've sent many an invitation (many of which have been warmly received and resulted in improvements in wallet implementations).
And basically all of this was done by people who weren't being paid a cent for it, by you or anyone else-- I might add. And when there was a simple, not very technical, part of the effort that I thought wider help would be important for, I plead for it here-- to seemingly no effect. Apparently its not as big a deal as some are making it out to be.
... so in the meantime, while all of that was going on ... precisely what have you done except insult the few people who've done anything productive at all about this subject?
Even without a protocol specification, bitcoin core could be changed so that bitcoin core nodes would not relay ill formed transactions, nor accept and propagate blocks that contain ill formed transactions.
Kind of you to confirm that you're responding in this thread without having read it (or my response to you in the other thread on the same subject.)
Protocol incompetently designed so it has malleability bug. Protocol and software incompetently maintained because bug has yet to be fixed after several years.
Specific forms of malleability are useful and intentional design features of the protocol. Additional forms allowing unintended malleability arose primarily out of undocumented behavior in underlying cryptographic libraries which have also resulted in CVEed vulnerabilities in unrelated applications-- indeed those later kind were a design error-- but most of them (save the one whos fix was inhibited by wallet behavior were largely closed off ages ago). Meanwhile, in spite of these issues having been well understood for years virtually every altcoin is also vulnerable to them including many 'from scratch ones' and ones created years after the issues were known in Bitcoin and fixed in Bitcoin Core (and even, in at least one case-- one that specifically promotes itself as being 'immune'). While it is unfortunate the the system was created with
merely superhuman foresight and not
perfect foresight, if you're looking to complain about _incompetent_ you need to go look to those other places, not Bitcoin Core which immediately implemented solutions for every known unintended malleability vector once they were first highlighted as an issue and discovered several new ones along the way.
the network wouldn't be having problems
The network itself is working fine and is completely uninterrupted by this stuff, whats impacted are some wallets in some applications. See also
http://fc15.ifca.ai/preproceedings/bitcoin/paper_9.pdf
