Author: Gavin Andresen 2015-06-01 13:15:18
Published on: 2015-06-01T13:15:18+00:00
In an email conversation between Gavin Andresen and Alex Mizrahi, the topic of discussion was the impact of block size on orphan rates. Chun had mentioned that his pool was on a slow network and thus bigger blocks would give it a disadvantage. Mizrahi had initially said that those who make big blocks have a disadvantage but later agreed with Chun's point. If an attacker produced a big block, it would take at least six seconds to process it. The assumption was that Chun was talking about the "what if somebody produces a block that takes a long time to process" attack, which doesn't work. If it takes six seconds to validate because of limited bandwidth, then Chun should connect via Matt's fast relay network, which optimizes new block announcements so they take a couple orders of magnitude less bandwidth. If he is trying to validate on a raspberry pi, he should buy a better validating machine, and/or help test the current pending pull requests to make validation faster. If Chun has six seconds of latency and cannot pay for a lower-latency connection (or it is insanely expensive), then there's nothing he can do, and he'll have to live with a higher orphan rate regardless of the block size.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T21:51:00.756732+00:00