[bitcoin-dev] "Compressed" headers stream

[Greg Sanders]

Is there any reason to believe that you need Bitcoin "full security" at all
for timestamping?

On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 11:50 AM, Riccardo Casatta via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> the Bitcoin headers are probably the most condensed and important piece of
> data in the world, their demand is expected to grow.
>
> When sending a stream of continuous block headers, a common case in IBD
> and in disconnected clients, I think there is a possible optimization of
> the transmitted data:
> The headers after the first could avoid transmitting the previous hash
> cause the receiver could compute it by double hashing the previous header
> (an operation he needs to do anyway to verify PoW).
> In a long stream, for example 2016 headers, the savings in bandwidth are
> about 32/80 ~= 40%
> without compressed headers 2016*80=161280 bytes
> with compressed headers 80+2015*48=96800 bytes
>
> What do you think?
>
>
> In OpenTimestamps calendars we are going to use this compression to give
> lite-client a reasonable secure proofs (a full node give higher security
> but isn't feasible in all situations, for example for in-browser
> verification)
> To speed up sync of a new client Electrum starts with the download of a
> file <https://headers.electrum.org/blockchain_headers> ~36MB containing
> the first 477637 headers.
> For this kind of clients could be useful a common http API with fixed
> position chunks to leverage http caching. For example /headers/2016/0
> returns the headers from the genesis to the 2015 header included while
> /headers/2016/1 gives the headers from the 2016th to the 4031.
> Other endpoints could have chunks of 20160 blocks or 201600 such that with
> about 10 http requests a client could fast sync the headers
>
>
> --
> Riccardo Casatta - @RCasatta <https://twitter.com/RCasatta>
>
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>
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