Author: Peter Todd 2015-08-21 05:42:19
Published on: 2015-08-21T05:42:19+00:00
Peter Todd, a bitcoin developer, raised concerns over the scalability and privacy issues with Bloom filters in Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 37. The proposal did not specify a service bit for the bloom filter service, implicitly assuming that all nodes that serve peers data support it. However, the connection filtering algorithm proposed in BIP 37 has been shown to provide little to no privacy and creates a large Denial-of-Service risk on some nodes. Therefore, Todd suggested the need for a feature that allows node operators to disable connection bloom filtering. Additionally, Bloom filters have scaling issues as each application of the filter has to scan the whole blockchain. With future block size increases, these issues increase dramatically, and the underlying idea conflicts with some proposals to "shard" the blockchain. Todd recommended handling future upgrades to more scalable designs by adding a bit.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T20:44:06.589248+00:00