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 can save up to 20% on a single transaction. This method avoids violating layering, allows for single transaction access, and is compatible with transaction relay. The format also optimizes predictable hashes, achieving savings that cannot be achieved by generic compressors. However, the savings from generic compressors mostly come from repeated pubkeys and addresses, which may be diminished by taproot and signature aggregation in the future.Using generic compression interfaces like zlib across networks has had a disappointing security track record. Previous discussions have centered around using generic compressors, as seen in the list archive and bitcoin-core Github. Recently, Nitsopoulos Konstantinos proposed using the 7z file type to compress new blocks by up to 18%, potentially reducing the size of the blockchain to under 290GB if converted into a 7z archive-chain. However, he admitted that programming compression was too difficult for him and hoped someone else would take on the task. He also suggested compressing transactions by replacing addresses and coins with their own unique sequential index, which could potentially reduce the size of a transaction between two existing addresses to half or even a quarter of its current size.Pavol Rusnak, the co-founder and CTO of SatoshiLabs, shared information about Zstandard (zstd), a block compression algorithm that offers better properties than its competitors, especially for decompression. The provided link leads to the GitHub repository for zstd, where more information about the algorithm can be found.
Updated on: 2023-08-02T03:41:12.142651+00:00