Author: Marco Pontello 2015-11-11 18:49:49
Published on: 2015-11-11T18:49:49+00:00
The discussion started with a random thought about most communications being compressed in some way. While generic, data agnostic compression may not give any practical advantage over current compression protocols, something that could take advantage of specific knowledge about the data could be more beneficial. The test results for compression ratios of the first 295,000 blocks were shared by Peter Tschipper via bitcoin-dev. The proposal was to compress blocks with a compression library, advertise compression as a service as a fallback and do the compression at the datastream level in the code. The results showed that serving up compressed blocks, at least historical blocks, will be of benefit for those that have bandwidth caps on their internet connections. Jeff Garzik commented on the proposal mentioning that zlib has a poor security track record and LZO should provide much better compression, but at a cost of CPU performance and using a less-reviewed, less-field-tested library. Tier Nolan suggested defining a "cblocks" message that handles multiple blocks and combining transactions together and compressing them as "ctxs". It was also suggested to define a message which is a compressed message holder. Johnathan Corgan reinforced the idea that such trade-off decisions should be local and negotiated between peers, rather than a required feature of the network P2P.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T00:58:32.464923+00:00