Author: Bob McElrath 2015-11-09 21:04:49
Published on: 2015-11-09T21:04:49+00:00
A proposal to incorporate datastream compression into Bitcoin's block relay mechanism has been submitted. The idea is to compress the data before sending it, initially for blocks only, but theoretically could be done for transactions as well. The proposal suggests an average of 20% block compression and taking 90 milliseconds for a full block (on a very slow laptop) to compress. The savings will mostly be in terms of less bandwidth used, but there could also be a small performance gain during the transmission of the blocks particularly where network latency is higher. However, zlib compression was found to make the file larger, so it is not feasible. The proposal suggests using BIP titled "Support for Datastream Compression" instead of "Zlib Compression for block relay," since it could also be used for transactions as well at a later time.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T00:57:58.086558+00:00