Why do we need a timestamps fork? Cant it just cycle round?
Discussion
Uhhh, no, not to my knowledge. Nodes will reject blocks above a certain height, so eventually the network stops accepting new blocks. Nodes would reject blocks with lower block heights because they were created with timestamps too far in the futute, and they wouldn't be able to reference transactions that occur at higher block heights. Even if they could, what happens to the old block 1, 2, 3 etc.? If you had bitcoin in those blocks then I guess it would be gone. Finally, that too would require a fork, with many more consensus changes than required to simply make the maximum block height a trillion trillion years in the future. I think it might make sense to apply this patch soon, but date it too take effect in like 10 years, that way every node today will have received and patched far in advance and there's a clean break. I also think we shouldn't change the chaincode (no wipeout protection), lest some scammers want to continue a broken version of bitcoin saying its the original.