[bitcoin-dev] BIP Proposal: Compact Client Side Filtering for Light Clients

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Thu, Jun 1, 2017 at 7:01 PM, Olaoluwa Osuntokun via bitcoin-dev
<bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> Hi y'all,
>
> Alex Akselrod and I would like to propose a new light client BIP for
> consideration:
>    * https://github.com/Roasbeef/bips/blob/master/gcs_light_client.mediawiki

I see the inner loop of construction and lookup are free of
non-constant divmod. This will result in implementations being
needlessly slow (especially on arm, but even on modern x86_64 a
division is a 90 cycle-ish affair.)

I believe this can be fixed by using this approach
http://lemire.me/blog/2016/06/27/a-fast-alternative-to-the-modulo-reduction/
   which has the same non-uniformity as mod but needs only a multiply
and shift.

Otherwise fast implementations will have to implement the code to
compute bit twiddling hack exact division code, which is kind of
complicated. (e.g. via the technique in "{N}-bit Unsigned Division via
{N}-bit Multiply-Add" by Arch D. Robison).

Shouldn't all cases in your spec where you have N=transactions be
n=indexed-outputs? Otherwise, I think your golomb parameter and false
positive rate are wrong.