Author: Gregory Maxwell 2014-04-10 11:50:55
Published on: 2014-04-10T11:50:55+00:00
The email conversation between Pieter Wuille and others discusses the issue of indicating block availability. Two ideas were proposed, either using a few service bits or extending addr messages with flags. A hybrid approach was suggested where bits would indicate the general degree of availability, but actual availability would only be indicated upon connecting. The reason for this is that the blocks available are likely to change frequently, and are not that important to actual peer selection. However, another member of the conversation argued that kept ranges should be circulated to avoid hunting for nodes with the desired blocks, which could take a long time. The changing values were deemed to be related to only the most recent blocks, so it was suggested that a flag for keeping the most recent 2000 blocks or a single offset range for the last N=200 be used in addition to whatever additional range was signaled. Regardless, any node serving blocks should at least keep the last N blocks.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T18:35:37.401110+00:00