Author: theymos 2011-12-17 21:49:18
Published on: 2011-12-17T21:49:18+00:00
In December 2011, Gavin Andresen, a prominent Bitcoin developer, expressed concerns about scalability issues with the then-current system. He suggested that there may be a problem with full nodes refusing to answer requests from lightweight nodes and that there may be too few full nodes to handle the load. To address these concerns, he proposed a solution where lightweight clients would download only headers and Merkle trees, which are both small and easy to distribute. Under this scheme, senders would need to contact recipients directly in order to transmit their transactions, and clients would never need full blocks to build their balances. Full nodes would not have to handle expensive queries from lightweight clients, and dealing with the client network would not require many resources. Andresen also suggested that members of the full network could connect to the most reliable members of the client network to broadcast headers and Merkle trees and receive transactions. The current broadcast system could be used among full nodes for a long time, while the client network could form a separate network with less reliable broadcasting and perhaps a fancier network architecture. Creating a "separate" network like this can be done by using the services field.While requiring senders to email some data to the recipient would not be too burdensome, it might be possible to design a system where even offline recipients can receive transactions through the Bitcoin network. Overall, Andresen's proposal aimed to address scalability issues and reduce the burden on full nodes while still allowing for efficient transmission of transactions between clients.
Updated on: 2023-06-05T00:43:29.526179+00:00