Author: Matt Whitlock 2015-05-26 04:37:18
Published on: 2015-05-26T04:37:18+00:00
In an email to the Bitcoin Development mailing list, Jim Phillips has asked if there is any work being done on using a zero-configuration (zero-conf) service discovery protocol so that lightweight clients can find a full node on the same local area network (LAN) to peer with. Jim imagines a future where lightweight devices within a home use Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) over WiFi to connect with a home server which in turn relays the transactions they create out to the larger and faster relays on the Internet. This could result in lower traffic across the slow WAN connection. Jim also realizes that having hundreds or thousands of small SPV devices in a single home monitoring the blockchain could potentially take up a lot of bandwidth before the total bandwidth is greater than downloading a full copy of the blockchain. However, hosting your own full node allows for trust, which is one of the other reasons to host your own full node. To ping all nodes on a LAN, users can simply ping the "all nodes" address (ff02::1) and try connecting to TCP port 8333 of each node that responds. This shouldn't take more than a few milliseconds on any but the most densely populated LANs.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T21:22:32.161434+00:00