Author: Gavin Andresen 2015-09-23 15:43:11
Published on: 2015-09-23T15:43:11+00:00
The concept of 'weak blocks' has been proposed as a way to improve mining efficiency and prevent DoS attacks. Weak blocks are pre-announced by miners before solving the proof-of-work puzzle and are validated quickly by peers, which should result in faster block propagation when a full-difficulty block is found. If accepting the full-difficulty block and CreateNewBlock() operations can be made fast enough, miners will have an incentive to include fee-paying transactions in their blocks rather than mining empty ones. While a miner could try to avoid validation work by taking a weak block announced by someone else, they would still have to mine empty blocks between the time a full block is found and a fully-validating miner announces their next weak block. Weak block announcements benefit the network by giving transaction creators an idea of whether their transactions are likely to be confirmed in the next block. If implemented properly, weak blocks should not significantly increase bandwidth or CPU usage.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T22:54:00.161955+00:00