Author: Mike Hearn 2014-03-27 11:39:21
Published on: 2014-03-27T11:39:21+00:00
Bandwidth is an issue for Electrum and Mycelium in terms of watching a large number of addresses as it will create too much traffic on the servers. While Bloom filters do encode addresses and keys, they don't reduce bandwidth usage. The simplest implementation from a wallet's POV is to step through each transaction in the blockchain one at a time, but that would be slow. Pre-generating a larger lookahead region and requesting more data in one batch is the solution, but this can be painful. The opinion for Electrum is that merchant accounts should behave differently from regular user accounts, while merchants need to generate an unlimited number of receiving addresses; it is also acceptable for them to have a slightly more complex wallet recovery procedure. However, any distinction between users and merchants may not be safe. Fully automated synchronization between different instances of a wallet using only no other source of information than the blockchain won't be possible as we keep adding features because the blockchain cannot sync all the relevant data.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T16:04:38.736345+00:00