Author: Tier Nolan 2014-04-07 19:13:07
Published on: 2014-04-07T19:13:07+00:00
In an email exchange on April 7, 2014, Gregory Maxwell discussed the drawbacks of using a bitmap to advertise non-contiguous blocks in blockchain. He noted that it would result in high overhead and poor locality since blocks are fetched sequentially. Instead, he suggested using a range as a compromise and putting it in the address. Maxwell also proposed two ways to handle download overhead for light nodes in the network. One option was to have light nodes randomly select a contiguous 1GB of the blockchain, which would reduce the burden on full nodes. Another idea was to implement a routing table where queried nodes could reply with the IP of a node with the requested block instead of sending the block itself.However, one issue with this solution is that light nodes would need to accept incoming connections, or else the block would have to be routed through the network.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T18:48:54.737896+00:00