Author: Anthony Towns 2018-03-30 06:14:18
Published on: 2018-03-30T06:14:18+00:00
Jim Posen, in a recent bitcoin-dev email thread, expressed interest in treating checkpoints as commitments to chain work. In response, another user suggested that checkpoints be set every 2016 blocks and include the corresponding bits value for that set of blocks. By doing so, each node would commit to approximately how much work their entire chain has by sending around 10KB of data. The deltas in each node's chain's target could then be verified by downloading the 2016 headers between those checkpoints (~80kB with the proposed compact encoding?) and checking the timestamps and proof of work match both the old target and the new target from adjacent checkpoints. This method would still work even if there is a hardfork that allows difficulty to adjust more frequently and would allow for estimating how much work will have been done, although it may be less precise than the current estimate.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T05:24:08.344647+00:00