[Bitcoin-development] Cut-through propagation of blocks

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 2:36 AM, Mike Hearn <mike at plan99.net> wrote:
> Although this is a somewhat appealing notion, would it really improve
> feature velocity? I don't think the current p2p protocol is holding anything
> back, and having to implement features twice in two protocols would slow
> things down quite a bit.

If someone wanted to implement swanky UDP non-blocking transports or
complex network coding schemes I'd probably want to see the proven in
actual use before sticking them in the reference code, so yes.

It's also the case that the ~last addition we made to the P2P code
added a remotely exploitable crash bug.

There are some pretty distinct use cases out there— fast block
relaying, supporting thin clients, minimizing bandwidth (e.g. via
compression and tx/block redundancy elimination), etc. Some of them
may not be well handled by an external gateway, some of them (e.g.
block relaying) very much could be.

The nice thing with alternative protocols and gatewaying is that it
can proceed completely asynchronously with implementation development,
e.g. revving versions as fast as the users of the protocol care, and
could potentially be used immediately with other bitcoin
implementations... and if its buggy it doesn't break the nodes using
it: I'd be much more likely to run an experimental gateway in another
process on a node than experimental p2p code inside my production
bitcoinds themselves.