Crisis Invariant check per block height

[rigelrozanski]

Offshoot of #3656

Currently, the invariant check messages run at the latest height of the blockchain. This could be a problem if the invariant was temporarily broken (and thus should have halted the blockchain) but was then somehow corrected at a later height. Thus we ought to implement the ability to run an invariant check at a specific height of the blockchain.

[cwgoes]

That would be nice, but wouldn't it require that all nodes store all past state versions?

I think the most concerning invariant violations are likely to break an invariant that will remain broken - admittedly, it's hard to formalize that intuition, there could be exceptional cases.

[rigelrozanski]

Does cosmos store a certain amount of previous state?

but this seems like way less of a priority given #3969
which would make it less likely that an invariant would go unnoticed for any substantial amount of time

[cwgoes]

There is a default pruning strategy, which IIRC is fairly aggressive (prunes all but the most recent states).

I don't think we can reasonably expect node operators to store all past states (which we would require if it were part of the state machine like this).

Agreed that #3969 will reduce the need for this.

[rigelrozanski]

@cwgoes as long as there are a few blocks worth of state stored then we can at least be reassured that the correct circuit breaker occurs.. like it could be a part of this transaction that if you want to include a block height it can only occur within the past say 5 blocks from the current height (or else reject the transaction) - this would be sufficient to ensure that auto-sent transactions (per #3969) would definitely circuit break correctly. Of course I don't think it's reasonable for any more than a few blocks to be stored by the node operators.

but yeah this is low low priority AFAICT haha - for the long game

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[tac0turtle]

closing for now since we will end up rewriting how crisis works