Author: Gregory Maxwell 2017-08-28 17:12:15
Published on: 2017-08-28T17:12:15+00:00
In an email to bitcoin-dev, Riccardo Casatta expressed the opinion that Bitcoin headers are the most essential part of data in the world and their demand is expected to increase. He suggested that when sending a continuous stream of block headers, it would be possible to optimize the transmitted data by avoiding the transmission of previous hashes after the first header. The receiver could compute the previous hash by double hashing the previous header, which he needs to do anyway to verify the proof of work. This could result in savings of about 40% in bandwidth when sending a long stream of block headers. However, another contributor to the discussion pointed out that there were other ways to save bytes in the block headers field, such as not changing the bits field every 2016 blocks or only including the timestamp if it is greater than the median of the last 11. These improvements are just a constant factor. He recommended looking into compact SPV proofs described in the appendix of the sidechains whitepaper for log scaling proofs.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T03:34:16.118050+00:00