Published on: 2015-05-31T19:49:05+00:00
In an email conversation between Gavin Andresen and gb, the topic of calculating bandwidth for highly connected miners was discussed. Gb suggested that the traffic estimates needed to be increased by a factor of 30-100 due to the number of node connections a miner could have. However, Andresen pointed out that randomly connected gossip networks, such as the Bitcoin p2p network, operate differently and that bandwidth is roughly O(N), where N is the number of bytes relayed to everybody.Andresen also mentioned that the overhead of 'inv' messages could increase the bandwidth slightly, but this would not be a problem for years. The discussion revolves around the calculation of bandwidth for a highly connected miner with 30-100 node connections. This means that the traffic estimates need to be increased by that factor.For miners dealing with 100MB blocks, a bandwidth of 30-100 Mbps is required, which translates to data costs of $60-$100 per day. To handle this, the Aliyun and Linode cloud services are utilized for block propagation. As of May 2015, the price for 100Mbps connectivity at Aliyun is 0.13 U.S. dollars per GB. At this speed, it is possible to handle 20MB blocks without any issues.Each 20MB block is estimated to be 100MB of data up/down the wire, but after optimization, it should be reduced to 40MB. Based on this estimation, the cost for bandwidth will be less than $2 per day. It is acknowledged that a single cross-border TCP connection may be slower than 12.5 MB/s, but a speed of 1.3Mbps or less would still be sufficient.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T12:58:55.465354+00:00