Author: Anthony Towns 2022-10-05 06:55:39
Published on: 2022-10-05T06:55:39+00:00
Eric Voskuil via bitcoin-dev expressed concerns about bandwidth waste caused by the recent deployment of a protocol change that made it necessary for peers to allow other peers to waste their bandwidth in order to remain compatible. He pointed out that breaking the Bitcoin versioning scheme creates a requirement that any unknown message type be considered valid, which eliminates the ability to validate messages by type. This is an undocumented compatibility break that needs to be eliminated. According to Eric Voskuil, the only message listed as not being preceded by a bumped version number is addrv2, which is gated on mutual exchange of sendaddrv2. However, sendaddrv2 messages are only sent to nodes advertising version 70016 or later. ADDRV2 was introduced on May 20, 2020, after the 0.20 branch, and SENDADDRV2 gating was merged on Dec 9, 2020, and included from 0.21.0rc3 onwards. Nodes advertising a version of 0.17 and 0.18 show "bytesrecv_per_msg. *other*" entries, possibly due to REJECT messages for taproot transactions. Other than that, there are no unexpected messages that should be received when advertising version 70015 or lower. The concerns raised by Eric Voskuil emphasize the need to eliminate bandwidth waste caused by the recent protocol change.
Updated on: 2023-05-22T20:25:13.475996+00:00