Author: Gregory Maxwell 2015-08-05 20:16:34
Published on: 2015-08-05T20:16:34+00:00
In a discussion on bitcoin-dev, Arnoud Kouwenhoven - Pukaki Corp expressed his understanding of the bitcoin relay network as being a backbone of connected high-speed servers to increase the rate at which transactions and new blocks propagate. However, he also mentioned that it would still require the miners to download the entire block before building on top of it with any degree of confidence. The response to this was that his understanding was outdated.The current version of the relay network includes an optimized transmission protocol, which can send the entire block in just a small number of bytes. For example, block 000ce90846, which was 999950 bytes, was sent using at most 4906 bytes through the relay network protocol. No trust is required in this scheme as the entire block is communicated using only a couple of packets.The current scheme is highly simplified and its efficiency could be increased greatly with small improvements, or if miners created blocks in an aware manner. However, with a maximum size of blocks turning into 5kb with the current setup, there hardly appears to be a reason to do so right now.Ultimately, there is no need for information communicated with a block at discovery time proportional to the size of the block; with the right affordances, it can be accomplished with a small constant amount of data. If not for the current deployment of this relay network, the network would have already fallen into complete centralization as a response to larger blocks. The relay network was constructed and deployed in order to pull the network back from having a single pool with more than half the hashrate.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T21:14:18.868959+00:00