How Falcon, FIBRE and the Fast Relay Network Speed Up Bitcoin Block Propagation (Part 2)
Bitcoin is designed as a peer-to-peer network, where nodes randomly connect to other nodes. Transactions and blocks are transmitted over this network by these nodes, until each has received all. This works quite well, as the distributed model makes Bitcoin relatively censorship-resistant; there is no central point of control to shut down or pressure into....
Related News
Bitcoin Core, the open source project which maintains and releases Bitcoin client software, has fully embraced BIP152, a new upgrade that will reduce the amount of bandwidth used to propagate new blocks to full nodes. This will decrease the amount of time it takes for a block to propagate across the entire Bitcoin network. Bitcoin Core has published an FAQ section regarding the most recent Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP), we are talking about the BIP 152 named Compact Block Relay, the upgrade is poised to reduce the bandwidth and the time it takes for a block to propagate through the....
It is generally accepted that latency in block propagation is one of the bottlenecks for Bitcoin scaling. This is why many of Bitcoin’s most active developers and researchers have presented a series of solutions to compress blocks and speed up propagationover the past years. It is not as well known that these solutions may not suffice on their own. Due to a practice called “spy mining” or “pool-watcher mining,” Bitcoin mining has increasingly come to rely on the data and network infrastructure provided by mining pools. As a result, many mining pools are not necessarily incentivized to....
ConsenSys, a blockchain technology company, and Ethereum have developed BTC Relay, an Ethereum contract that allows Ethereum users to pay with bitcoin. Servicing as a bridge between Ethereum and bitcoin, BTC Relay is a tool for developers who want to verify bitcoin transactions for Ethereum and smart contract applications. Community members, called Relayers, provide BTC Relay with new bitcoin block headers generated by bitcoin miners. Ethereum app developers can make API calls to BTC Relay from smart contracts to verify bitcoin network activities. Anyone can join the Ethereum network and....
Bitcoin is designed as a peer-to-peer network, where nodes randomly connect to other nodes. Transactions and blocks are transmitted over this network by these nodes, until each node receives all the latest transactions and blocks. This works quite well, as the distributed model makes Bitcoin relatively censorship-resistant; there is no central point of control to shut down or pressure into compliance. But there are other, more centralized alternatives for transmitting transaction data, too. The best known of these is "the" relay network, introduced in 2014 and maintained by Bitcoin Core....
Bitcoin is designed as a peer-to-peer network, where nodes randomly connect to other nodes. Transactions and blocks are transmitted over this network by these nodes, until each has received all. This works quite well, as the distributed model makes Bitcoin relatively censorship-resistant; there is no central point of control to shut down or pressure into compliance. But it also has a significant downside: The peer-to-peer network is relatively slow. As such, miners (and pools) sometimes waste hash power mining on top of an old block while a newer block is finding its way through the....