Author: Greg Maxwell 2021-04-24 19:17:41
Published on: 2021-04-24T19:17:41+00:00
A recent discussion on Bitcointalk revealed that the Blockstream satellite codebase has an alternative serialization that works on a single transaction and saves approximately 20%. This method avoids violating layering, preserves single transaction access, and is compatible with transaction relay. The format also optimizes predictable hashes, achieving savings that no generic compressor could ever achieve.However, most of the savings from generic compressors come from repeated pubkeys and addresses, making it highly variable and dependent on address reuse. It is likely to be diminished by taproot due to shrinking multisig and very much reduced by signature aggregation in the future.Using generic compression interfaces like zlib across networks has had a disappointing security track record. In the past, many discussions have revolved around using generic compressors, as evidenced by the list archive and bitcoin-core Github.Recently, Nitsopoulos Konstantinos suggested using the 7z file type to compress new blocks by up to 18%, reducing the size of the blockchain to under 290GB if it's converted into a 7z archive-chain. However, he acknowledged that programming compression was too difficult for him and hoped someone else would do it. He also believed that transactions could be compressed by replacing addresses and coins wherever possible with their own unique sequential index. If implemented, this could reduce the size of a transaction between two existing addresses to half or maybe a quarter of its current size.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T20:31:53.679895+00:00