Author: John Dillon 2013-07-28 18:42:26
Published on: 2013-07-28T18:42:26+00:00
The email thread discusses the idea of distributing headers with 1/64th of the standard Proof of Work (POW). The aim is to incentivize miners to take headers into account. This would help make forks less likely and prevent a fork from suddenly becoming the main chain due to a new block if it is within 16 mini-confirms. However, there are concerns that this change would require miners to have better network connections and could change economics. Another suggestion for measuring orphan blocks revolves around setting some threshold relative to the height of the best block. Beyond this limit, orphan blocks or headers would not be propagated further. This change should be compatible with the P2P protocol as it is based on inventories. The email also mentions that Pieter Wuille is working on letting Bitcoin propagate and make use of pure block headers, which would be a step towards Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) and partial UTXO mode.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T14:28:29.448898+00:00