bitcoin/bitcoin — pull request #5496 by petertodd (2014-12-17 06:51:54+00:00)
Title: Mempool only CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY (BIP65) verification

Essentially makes passing CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY (BIP65) an IsStandard() rule to make it easy to test applications using it; blocks containing transactions with invalid CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY arguments are still accepted.

This pull-req is *not* a soft-fork nor does it contain any code to start that process.

An alternative would be to make a command-line flag to enable CLTV, however actually implementing that is somewhat ugly. There is a small risk of people thinking that it's safe to depend on CLTV, although I think that's outweighed by the value of thoroughly testing everything but the soft-fork itself.

Thanks for @sipa and also @btcdrak for the rebase. Credit goes to @gmaxwell for the suggestion of comparing the argument against the transaction nLockTime rather than the current time/blockheight directly.

Background: BIP65 - https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0065.mediawiki