Author: Pieter Wuille 2012-10-24 16:22:56
Published on: 2012-10-24T16:22:56+00:00
On October 24th, 2012, Mike Hearn wrote a draft BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) describing the bloom filtering protocol extension developed by himself and Matt. The purpose of this proposal was to limit the number of transactions that would be transmitted, in an effort to reduce the amount of bandwidth needed to transmit data. However, some questions arose about the specifics of the proposal, such as why the number of matching transactions was limited to 255, what "each hash and key in the output script" meant exactly, and whether sharing parts of the Merkle branches was worthwhile or not.As Mike was writing the BIP, he realized that the method of delaying reception of invs (inventory messages) was a bit ad-hoc, and suggested that it might be better to have a Bloom filter be sent in the version message itself. However, Pieter, who was reviewing the proposal, was not in favor of stuffing too much into the version message, which he felt was already overloaded. Instead, he suggested using a byte with some bit-flags, with higher bits added later for other boolean flags.Overall, the proposal aimed to improve the efficiency of the Bitcoin network by reducing bandwidth usage through the use of Bloom filters. However, there were still some details that needed to be ironed out before the proposal could be finalized.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T15:59:57.626998+00:00