Author: Riccardo Casatta 2017-08-28 15:50:23
Published on: 2017-08-28T15:50:23+00:00
The Bitcoin headers are considered to be the most important and condensed data in the world, with growing demand for them. A possible optimization for transmitting a stream of continuous block headers could be to avoid transmitting the previous hash after the first header since the receiver can compute it by double hashing the previous header. This would result in approximately 40% savings in bandwidth, as computed for a long stream of 2016 headers. OpenTimestamps calendars plan to use this compression for lite-clients to provide reasonable secure proofs without relying on a full node. Electrum downloads a ~36MB file containing the first 477637 headers to speed up sync of a new client. To optimize this process, a common http API with fixed position chunks could be used, such that a client could fast sync the headers in about 10 http requests.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T03:31:08.926343+00:00