Completing the retirement of the alert system

One of the features of the system is that a maximum sequence alert can be sent, which cannot be overridden and displays only a static key compromise text message, blocking all other alerts. Gregory Maxwell announced his plan to trigger this alert in the near future, with exact timing to be announced well in advance, to eliminate any further potential of reputation attacks and diminish the risk of misunderstanding the key as some special trusted source of authority. Though this could cause a small one-time disruption of some automatic systems that shut down when there is an alert, it will not be worse than if an alert were sent to advise about a new system upgrade. Peter Todd responded, stating that it is better to retire the final alert key sooner rather than later, as alert propagation on the P2P network will continue to get less reliable as nodes upgrade to software that has removed alert functionality.