Author: Mike Hearn 2012-05-16 16:46:59
Published on: 2012-05-16T16:46:59+00:00
The author of the message is proposing an alternative solution to a specific proposal and plans to implement the original design outlined more than a year ago. The proposed method involves using a new protocol command to set a Bloom filter on a connection which would allow only transactions matching that filter to appear in relayed inventory. Clients are expected to maintain and track the block chain, but instead of downloading the entire chain and dropping irrelevant transactions, filtering is done server-side. By strengthening or weakening the Bloom filters, clients can choose their preferred point on the privacy/bandwidth-usage spectrum. The filters would be applied to each data block in each script rather than having specific knowledge of addresses, allowing selection for things like multisig outputs or outputs that don't use addresses/pubkeys to authenticate. The author suggests writing a BIP for this alternative protocol if someone else wants to implement it. Simple optimizations to BitcoinJ can keep its performance good enough for the short term. Overall, the proposed alternative solution is a fairly simple change to the Satoshi and BitcoinJ codebases while still allowing clients to gain confidence in their balance by examining the chain.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T04:34:38.326511+00:00