Author: Gregory Maxwell 2012-06-18 00:24:27
Published on: 2012-06-18T00:24:27+00:00
Currently, block propagation is causing issues for miners as it can take minutes. Validation of blocks before relaying them is IO intensive and can take up to a minute alone on slow nodes with large blocks. This risks creating mismatched incentives where miners are better off not mining many transactions in order to maximize their income. However, there is a short-term improvement that can be made at the protocol level: make it possible to relay blocks to other nodes before fully validating them. Basic validation can be done first, so this change would still be secure. Luke-jr has been working on a patch for this improvement, which includes the use of a new message for preview-blocks instead of just announcing them like normal. This will prevent existing full nodes from blacklisting nodes sending a bad preview block due to existing misbehavior checks, and SPV nodes can opt-out or at least know that the data is not yet validated by the peer. This change would be beneficial even after any other performance improvements were made. There may be other contributing factors to the issue, but this is one of the most obvious solutions.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T03:49:56.295217+00:00