Author: Jim Posen 2017-12-11 21:56:08
Published on: 2017-12-11T21:56:08+00:00
The bitcoin-dev mailing list is discussing a proposal to reduce the bandwidth needed for Bitcoin header messages by removing the nBits field, which contains difficulty information. The proposal has been criticised for being too dependent on specific validation rules of the Bitcoin protocol; however, supporters argue that omitting nBits saves bytes and is worth the extra complexity in validation code. Another issue raised in the discussion is the need to encode leading bits of prev, which are used as an extra nonce for miners. While some altcoins have already changed their header structures, making the proposed change possibly incompatible, supporters argue that it would be worth it to competitively advance Bitcoin. Additionally, the discussion also covers the possibility of parallel header fetching to optimise header download.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T15:09:45.481420+00:00