[Bitcoin-development] Segmented Block Relaying BIP draft.

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 10:05 AM, Matthew Mitchell
<matthewmitchell at godofgod.co.uk> wrote:

> @Gregory
>
>> But you only need to request the transactions you don't have. Most of
>> time you should already have almost all of the transactions.
>
> Yes, my proposal allows you to do this. You skip out transactions your already have. My proposal is simply better than others because it takes full advantage of the merkle tree structure with minor additions that are simple to implement. How hard is it to get the hashes at a particular level of a merkle tree? Not hard at all. How hard is it to place a selection of transactions from a block into a message Not hard at all. Implementation of the protocol requirements would be a piece of cake. The harder bit would be to create an algorithm to determine the best level of segmentation but this is not required to comply with the protocol.

Sorry, I'm still not seeing what the value is.  How is the tree level
useful to anyone?  If you did want to get only parts of the
transaction list, why not just ranges from the lowest level?