Low-bandwidth transaction relay



Summary:

Gleb Naumenko, a member of the bitcoin-dev community, proposed an idea related to transaction relay protocol. After conducting an emulation and simulation, he found out that around 90% of INV messages sent by public-IP nodes are idle (duplicate), which results in significant overall bandwidth consumption. To address this issue, Gleb suggested a new protocol that would keep the same zero-trust, decentralization guarantees and latency while reducing redundancy by filtering transactions through N=2 links. The proposal is in some sense similar to BIP37 but applied to public-IP nodes. Gleb's idea is to have a new node agree on some filter with each of 8 nodes it connects to while joining the network. Each node will then relay only a subset of transactions, thereby reducing redundancy. To make the new protocol robust to attacks, Gleb has two extensions in mind: set reconciliation and rotating filters every N minutes. Feedback on the proposal is appreciated.


Updated on: 2023-06-13T01:21:19.492873+00:00