Author: Jonathan Toomim (Toomim Bros) 2015-09-23 22:16:14
Published on: 2015-09-23T22:16:14+00:00
In a discussion on bitcoin-dev, Gavin Andresen warns about the potential issue of making mining not progress free by using a scheme where a full solution must be exactly identical to a prior weak block. Instead, he suggests using an optimized protocol that is forward-error-coded and does not require exact matching. One possible improvement proposed is to cache Merkle nodes/subtrees, allowing miners to describe their block in terms of Merkle nodes and copy a portion from another miner's weak block while modifying the remaining non-prespecified portion. This gives small miners the ability to trade off versatility versus propagation speed. The author also proposes a block propagation protocol inspired by bittorrent applied to the Merkle tree instead of chunks of a file, incorporating weak blocks by caching and pre-transmitting Merkle nodes.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T22:53:28.387315+00:00