Author: Pieter Wuille 2014-04-10 11:32:44
Published on: 2014-04-10T11:32:44+00:00
In a Bitcoin-development mailing list, there were discussions about how to indicate the availability of blocks. Two ideas were suggested: using one or a few service bits to indicate availability of blocks or extending addr messages with some flags to indicate this information. A hybrid approach was suggested to use bits to indicate the general degree of block availability but indicate actual availability only upon connecting through a separate message. This is because the actual blocks available are likely to change frequently and not that important to actual peer selection - only to drive the decision which blocks to ask after connection.Wladimir agreed that it is important to serve headers by default, but storing and serving full blocks should be configurable in ranges so people can tailor to their bandwidth and space available. This requires changes to the P2P protocol as currently, there is no way for a node to signal that they store only part of the blockchain. Clients will have to be modified to take this into account, and they are currently under the assumption that every full node can send them every previous block. There were questions about what this would involve and if there was any previous work towards this.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T18:35:58.652086+00:00