Author: Btc Drak 2015-09-23 16:07:31
Published on: 2015-09-23T16:07:31+00:00
The concept of 'weak blocks' was introduced to the Bitcoin community in 2015. Weak blocks are pre-announced blocks that miners are working on, before they have solved the proof-of-work puzzle. The purpose of weak blocks is to improve block propagation speed across the network. Gavin Andresen, a prominent figure in the Bitcoin community, suggested that if full-difficulty blocks based on previously announced weak blocks were found, block propagation should be extremely fast. Weak blocks are pre-validated, so when a full-difficulty block is found, the entire network can begin mining on the new block as soon as the information is relayed. This increases efficiency and reduces the time it takes for transactions to be confirmed. Transaction creators benefit from weak blocks because they have a better understanding of whether or not their transactions are likely to be confirmed in the next block. Although weak blocks can be exploited by miners who try to avoid validation work, this disadvantage is outweighed by the benefits. By incentivizing miners to create blocks with fee-paying transactions rather than empty blocks, weak blocks could potentially increase revenue for miners. There is no significant increase in bandwidth or CPU usage associated with weak blocks since multiple weak blocks at a given point in time are likely to contain the same transactions. For those interested in learning more about weak blocks, transcripts from Scaling Bitcoin discussions on the topic are available online.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T22:53:14.907040+00:00