Author: Gregory Maxwell 2015-05-12 19:03:55
Published on: 2015-05-12T19:03:55+00:00
The author expresses frustration that previous discussions on block coverage have not been taken into account. They summarize desirable characteristics for block coverage, including locality, historical blocks in contiguous ranges, and uniformity. Random peers with random blocks would be detrimental to performance, and storage on nodes with a fraction of the history should not depend on random peers due to potential attacks and lack of usefulness. Gaps would be handled by archive nodes. The decision to contact a node should require O(1) communications to avoid delays and sybil vulnerability. Communication about what blocks a node has should be compact and computationally efficient. The coverage created by the network should be uniform and remain as such as the blockchain grows. Refetching old blocks should not be necessary. The author notes that previous proposals have come close but failed at one or more points, and suggests that it is possible to meet all desired criteria with further exploration.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T20:21:54.562435+00:00