Why bother having limitations on Bitcoin Coinbase Transaction Scriptsigs?

Question

There are a few limitations on the structure of the coinbase (reward) transaction in a block.

1. There is only one input. vin.size() == 1 (source)
2. It doesn't reference any previous output. vin[0].prevout.IsNull() (source)
3. The scriptSig is not too big. vin[0].scriptSig.size() <= 100 (source)
4. The scriptSig is not too small. vin[0].scriptSig.size() >= 2 (source)

I don't see the point of any of these. #1 and #2 enable BIP34, but they are not necessary to achieve the same outcome. The size constraints don't really limit anything, if a miner wants to make a large block they can just many many outputs in their coinbase, or many many transactions into their block.

Why isn't a coinbase transaction just a transaction which:

1. Has at least one input that doesn't reference any previous outputs (for use in BIP34)
2. Allowed to claim up to (block reward + fees) more than it can spend

In particular, the coinbase could optionally have further null inputs and could spend previous outputs.

I know for Bitcoin it's likely too late for these to change. Is this a case of over-designing, or are there security reasons for any of these constraints on the coinbase? Loosening constraint #2, in particular, makes me pause because of a bitcoin development mailing list email concerning how allowing the coinbase to spend prevouts would enable securely paying a miner to mine a chain reorganization in a particular way.

Answer 1

The correct answer is: ask Satoshi.

My guessed answers to the questions you asked:

1. Why only one input? You can't predict when a particular coinbase transaction will make it into a successful block and you can't spend the output of a coinbase transaction for 100 blocks. That means using a regular transaction is much superior for any normal spending. If there's no normal case for adding inputs to a coinbase, maybe Satoshi thought it best to disallow inputs to prevent un-thought-of attacks.

2. Why reference a null outpoint? Using the same basic format as a regular transaction probably allowed code reuse. If he had optimized the coinbase, we would've saved 36 bytes times 338,692 blocks (so far), or about 12 MB. Not a big deal.

3. Why limit coinbase size to 100 bytes? We know Satoshi used the coinbase to put a message in block 0. Maybe a 100-byte limit was his attempt to prevent anyone else from using that same mechanism to add overlong messages. This was probably quite smart: from the fairly early days through today, many miners add messages to all of their coinbases---we can only imagine how annoying and wasteful those messages would be if they weren't limited to 100 bytes.

4. Why specify minimum coinbase size as 2 bytes? Highly speculative here, but maybe Satoshi foresaw the easy-duplication-of-coinbases described in BIP30 and wanted to require people use something like the original extranonce to help prevent accidental TXID collisions.