Author: Chris Pacia 2015-02-21 18:38:05
Published on: 2015-02-21T18:38:05+00:00
In an email conversation between Mike Hearn and another individual, they discuss the efficiency of querying a single node when an address in the wallet matches a block filter. Mike argues that this method is less efficient for clients in the long run, as blocks with 1500 transactions are common and Bitcoin is growing rapidly. He imagines a system 10 times larger than today's, which would result in 15,000 transactions per block. Assuming each transaction has 5 unique keys or elements, there would be 75,000 unique elements per block. With a false positive rate of 0.1%, this results in 131.63KB of extra overhead per block. Over the course of a day, this would amount to 18mb of data per day's worth of sync to pull down over the network. This amount of data may not be competitive for mobile devices even in developed countries. However, Mike argues that it doesn't matter much because anyone watching the wire close to you can still learn which transactions are yours, and anyone running a node can learn which transactions in the requested block were yours and follow the tx chain to learn which other transactions might be yours too.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T17:32:43.963446+00:00