Author: Arnoud Kouwenhoven - Pukaki Corp 2015-08-05 19:53:52
Published on: 2015-08-05T19:53:52+00:00
The proposed solution to provide near-instantaneous block propagation on the bitcoin network is to introduce bitcoin-backed guarantees between miners, which would allow miners to mine on blocks that are not yet fully transmitted. This reduces the effect of slow internet connections, leveling the playing field between the 1st world fiberoptic datacenter miners and the rest of the world. It also strengthens the bitcoin network by using existing processing power that is currently wasted into further securing the blockchain, and it reduces the likelihood of transactions becoming confirmed, then unconfirmed and then hopefully confirmed again (due to different miners finding competing blocks with different transactions at approx the same time). The proposal is currently at v.0.2.The bitcoin relay network is a backbone of connected high-speed servers to increase the rate at which transactions and new blocks propagate and remove several delays in processing. However, it would still require miners to download the complete block before building on top of it with any degree of confidence. With a tweak to only send the required information for other miners to build on top of that block, this is a step towards the proposed solution, yet would require trust that the header information sent is accurate. The bitcoin relay network website states that blocks are not fully verified and should be checked by the miners before building on top of them.The proposed solution is more complex but reduces (and hopefully eliminates) the adverse incentive to entice miners to build on inaccurate data. This is achieved by making the financial losses of fake messages outweigh the financial gains of such attack vectors. It could also help in the block size debate if this proposed solution would eliminate the disadvantages of large blocks.Matt Corallo suggests checking Bitcoinrelaynetwork.org, which is already in use by the majority of large miners, publicly available to anyone, and its protocol is relatively simple. The client could be tweaked easily to keep exactly its block ready to quickly relay to the nearest server (i.e., only have to relay the header, the coinbase transaction, and only small other data). Experience shows this is effortless to fit into one packet on the wire. It may still marginally favor well-connected miners, but hopefully not much (when you're taking about single packets, it should all be latency, and the servers are well distributed).
Updated on: 2023-06-10T18:17:15.836655+00:00