Author: Peter Tschipper 2015-12-02 23:02:20
Published on: 2015-12-02T23:02:20+00:00
In a discussion among bitcoin developers in 2015, Matt Corallo expressed concerns about adding compression to bitcoin code due to the additional complexity and attack surface, and for only a minor gain. However, Peter Tschipper argued that Lempel-Ziv (LZ) compression had been around for 20 years with few problems and no current issues, and even if something better is found in the future, it would be easy to add it as Bitcoin could easily support multiple compression libraries. Emin Gün Sirer brought up the point that LZ compressors are generally based on "compression tables" which assign a short unique number to every new subsequence they encounter, which works well for English text but not for mostly binary data like Bitcoin. A custom Bitcoin-aware compressor could potentially achieve much higher compression ratios, but there are concerns about maintainability and testing. A programming challenge/contest was suggested as a way to find the best possible, Bitcoin-specific compressor.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T01:31:02.698087+00:00