Author: Matt Whitlock 2015-05-26 04:52:07
Published on: 2015-05-26T04:52:07+00:00
In May 2015, two individuals were discussing the use of a zero-conf service discovery protocol to allow lightweight clients to find a full node on the same local area network (LAN) to peer with instead of using wide area network (WAN) bandwidth. One individual suggested that the protocol could be used in a future where lightweight devices within a home use Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) over WiFi to connect with a home server which then relays transactions out to larger and faster relays on the internet. The other individual proposed a solution that would involve poisoning the DNS to force all the wallets to connect to a single local full node, which had connectivity to a single remote node over the internet, resulting in lower traffic across the slow WAN connection. This was done for a Bitcoin-only Wi-Fi network operated at a remote festival with well over a hundred lightweight wallets, all trying to connect to the Bitcoin P2P network over a very bandwidth-constrained Internet link.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T21:23:25.731534+00:00