[Bitcoin-development] Segmented Block Relaying BIP draft.

Matthew Mitchell matthewmitchell at godofgod.co.uk
Tue Sep 11 19:07:39 UTC 2012


For some reason sourceforge is not sending me updates anymore but I can see the replies online…

There could be a slightly more simple protocol which gives all the transactions hashes and nodes can then download the transactions separately. However there are two problems:

1. Downloading all the transactions individually might be inefficient. My proposal will allow nodes to request multiple transactions at once.
2. Why not add a few additional components to the protocol to allow requests for any level of the merkle tree? It's not very complicated at all and protects against the future.

Sure, analysis needs to be done to see at what point the proposal would give benefit and I will hopefully get around to doing some measurements of peer behaviour to aid with this.

I think it's a good idea to think ahead rather than only do what is beneficial for the network currently. The block sizes at the moment are about 0.1MB but what if the bitcoin demand starts pushing that into megabytes? And yes the ~0.95MB limit needs to be changed in order for bitcoin to grow that far. Why would the limit not be lifted? How will bitcoin demand be satisfied other than having large fees to deter transactions, hoping the fees are large enough to balance the demand with the block size limits to prevent many transactions being unconfirmed and annoying users? That limit has got to go eventually. And then it could be that block sizes do become large enough to worry about the performance in relaying.

Best not to leave this to the last minute, so at the very least I think it's good to talk about this.



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