Author: Jeff Garzik 2014-05-20 20:22:27
Published on: 2014-05-20T20:22:27+00:00
The discussion revolved around the possibility of extending the Bitcoin protocol to support UDP transport. This would allow for NAT traversal and for many more people to run effective nodes, as well as possibly improving block propagation time. Jeff Garzik, a Bitcoin core developer, had already spec'd out the UDP traversal of the P2P protocol and deemed it reasonable, especially for "inv" messages. Andy Alness, a software engineer at Coinbase, suggested reinventing TCP over UDP to handle blocks and large TXs, and offered UDP as a full TCP replacement capable of STUN-assisted NAT traversal and possibly swarmed blockchain syncs. It would require open TCP nodes to facilitate 'connection' establishment. The idea was interesting, but would require a non-trivial amount of work and could be considered an experiment. They also talked about the possibility of a blockchain fork due to network split, and how mining interests in China would make special arrangements to circumvent the Great Firewall of China, since users who can't access the worldwide blockchain would notice horrendously slow confirmation times and other side effects.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T18:51:21.550984+00:00