Author: Antoine Riard 2020-05-06 09:21:17
Published on: 2020-05-06T09:21:17+00:00
The discussion on bitcoin-dev mailing list revolves around the implementation of BIP 157 protocol in Core. The arguments against light clients are restated, including their burden on full nodes and the potential for a lack of full nodes to serve them. However, the choice isn't between using light clients or not, as people already use them. The choice is whether to offer a light client technology that is better or worse for privacy and scalability. The benefits of BIP 157 over existing light client technologies are summarized, including their uniqueness for a block, allowing clients to download from multiple sources, and being less prone to DoS attacks. Opponents to merging support for BIP 157 in Core argue that all efforts to improve the "full node-less" experience should be actively avoided, as they compromise Bitcoin's security model. However, BIP 157 can be implemented as a separate daemon that processes blocks downloaded by an attached bitcoind, as done by Wasabi. The intention of putting BIP 157 directly into bitcoind was to provide hope for BIP 157 clients to contact any arbitrary full node to get BIP 157 service. Deploying BIP 157 could lead to a DDoS on the full node network if a large number of BIP 157 clients arise. Watchtowers could provide light-client services, which is still less than ideal but may be better than nothing.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T01:12:12.315896+00:00