>
> I believe the idea was to make this as non-invasive as possible. And
> it would be really nice if this could be enabled without a dump/
> reload (maybe the upgrade stuff would make this possible?)
> --
It's all about the probability of a duplicate check being generated. If
you use a 32 bit checksum, then you have a theoretical probability of 1 in
4 billion that a corrupt block will be missed (probably much lower
depending on your algorithm). If you use a short, then a 1 in 65 thousand
probability. If you use an 8 bit number, then 1 in 256.
Why am I going on? Well, if there are any spare bits in a block header,
they could be used for the check value.