Author: Jay F 2013-04-29 06:10:54
Published on: 2013-04-29T06:10:54+00:00
The email conversation between Peter Todd and John Dillon discusses the possibility of using BitTorrent technology in the Bitcoin network. The main idea is to use analysis by clients of the part distribution, which allows a client to download and share the least-propagated parts first to maintain high availability of the whole file. Bittorrent only considers directly connected peers' piecemaps when making decisions of what to download. Unlike Bittorrent, a partial-blockchain swarm client needs to make informed decisions about how much to download, such as rules like "until it sees at least 20 complete blockchain-equivalents in the swarm", "until it has 10% of the blockchain itself", "work backwards, all blocks from the hash tree required to verify my payments" or other minimums that might all be criteria. Bitcoin already has a protocol to allow peer discovery beyond the connected nodes, which could be extended to communicate what parts the peer is hosting.However, careful thought into attack vectors would need to be paid in design so that only a majority of outbound-connected peers' advertisement are able to inform consensus about part or peer availability, messages able to remove a peer or part availability from other's lists are confirmed independently without such removal verification generating DDOS traffic amplification and lying clients can be marked as discovered by the majority etc. Such thought doesn't have to be paid if directly implementing Bittorrent. Still, it has the burden of centralized trackers or expensive DHT, and it doesn't have any logic informing it besides "don't quit until I get the whole file".
Updated on: 2023-06-06T15:48:24.765548+00:00