Author: Jeremy Rubin 2015-07-03 03:13:14
Published on: 2015-07-03T03:13:14+00:00
In a Bitcoin Development mailing list, Jean-Paul Kogelman, a game developer, suggested defining a minimum specification (min-spec) for Bitcoin Core to reduce the risk of breaking something due to capacity problems. He pointed out that having a min-spec would allow developers to know how their changes affect their available budgets, reducing the risk of breaking something due to capacity problems. One user, Mistr Bigs, also supported the idea, stating that he is an end user running a full node on an aging laptop and would love to know what system requirements are needed for running Bitcoin Core. Another user, Owen Gunden, acknowledged the idea and stated that Gavin Andresen, another Bitcoin Core developer, had done some back-of-the-envelope calculations around this stuff, but nothing clearly defined as what Kogelman proposed. Kogelman suggested targeting open hardware, specifically the RISC-V Rocket architecture, as a reference point for performance, which may have lower performance than desirable but avoids locking people into using large-vendor chipsets with unknown or known bad security properties such as Intel AMT. Kogelman asked if anyone knew how the RISC-V FPGA performance compares to a Raspberry Pi. Kogelman believed that targeting open hardware seemed more critical than performance metrics for the long term health of Bitcoin but still recognized that performance is important.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T01:57:01.014439+00:00