Author: Tom Zander 2017-04-21 08:27:36
Published on: 2017-04-21T08:27:36+00:00
Andrew Poelstra made a post on bitcoin-dev, where he discussed about the expected number of peers to download the entire blockchain. Tom Zander replied to his post and stated that the actual amount of nodes required to be 100% sure of finding all the blocks is not a maths problem that leads to a single answer due to the randomness involved. He further explained that the answer is a series of probabilities, like the age-old question of how many coin flips it takes to be 100% certain of getting at least one "Heads". Tom emphasized that it is silly to assume that 100% of the nodes would be partial-pruning as diversity is essential in distributed systems. He mentioned that the goal of the pruning node is to provide an improvement over the current pruning node, which stops any and all serving of historical blocks. Tom suggested that the focus should be on the real world rather than irrelevant math experiments that only lead to confusion.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T00:20:12.654951+00:00