Author: Peter R 2015-09-23 16:28:20
Published on: 2015-09-23T16:28:20+00:00
In an email exchange between Peter and Gavin Andresen from the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Peter raises a question regarding the necessity of considering block propagation in terms of the block size limit. Bitcoin has successfully operated unconstrained by this limit for its entire history except for the past few months, and block propagation has never been an issue. If the limit were raised significantly above the free market equilibrium block size Q*, mining pools and other miners would have an incentive to work out schemes like "weak blocks," relay networks, IBLTs, etc., to reduce the risk of orphaning larger blocks. Peter questions whether mining pools and miners should be paying developers for coding solutions that improve their profitability. Gavin responds to Peter's email with his thoughts on 'weak blocks' and SPV mining. The idea of weak blocks is for miners to pre-announce blocks that they're working on before they've solved the proof-of-work puzzle. Weak blocks are pre-validated, so when a full-difficulty block based on a previously announced weak block is found, block propagation should be insanely fast, as fast as a single packet can be relayed across the network. Gavin doesn't see any barrier to making accepting the full-difficulty block and CreateNewBlock() insanely fast. He believes miners will have an incentive to create blocks with fee-paying transactions rather than mining empty blocks. Weak block announcements are beneficial for the network as they give transaction creators a good idea of whether or not their transactions are likely to be confirmed in the next block. Gavin believes that if implemented smartly, weak blocks shouldn't increase bandwidth or CPU usage significantly because all the weak blocks at a given point in time are likely to contain the same transactions.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T22:54:33.455552+00:00