Author: Tier Nolan 2014-11-10 21:21:58
Published on: 2014-11-10T21:21:58+00:00
A proposed BIP was created to add auxiliary headers to Bitcoin in a bandwidth efficient way. The overhead per auxiliary header is only around 104 bytes per header, much smaller than embedding the hash of the header in the coinbase of the block. The last transaction in the block is used to store the hash of the auxiliary header. It makes use of the fact that the last transaction has a much less complex Merkle branch than the other transactions. Tier Nolan updated the BIP to cover only the specification of the transactions that need to be added and will create a network BIP tomorrow. Gregory Maxwell commented on the protocol changes, stating that tying them in is confusing and seemingly harder to deploy. He suggested separating the p2p part from the committed data. Tier Nolan responded with comments about tradeoffs between overhead and delayed transactions, adding padding transactions, and implementation headaches such as creating "seed" transactions and controlling UTXO for private keys. He suggested a middle ground where nodes can detect special transactions and use them.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T14:13:36.449245+00:00