Recently @pwuille, Gleb Naumenko, & Greg Maxwell revealed the #Minisketch library for reducing bandwidth requirements when syncing data between #Bitcoin nodes. Read more about what problems it helps solve, how it works, & its development progress. 📝🌐⛓️ https://t.co/xnQjjiLk8p pic.twitter.com/L2F4AOLK4L
— Blockstream (@Blockstream) January 7, 2019
Now this is what I'm talking about, freaks! Boring, yet extremely powerful proposals that, if leveraged by Bitcoin, will make it easier for individuals to run nodes. Ensuring the possibility that we can attain a necessary degree of decentralization to make Bitcoin as robust as possible. As you can see from the above screenshot, Minisketch would make the accessibility of running a node much better. If you've never run a full node, the most data-intensive parts of the process may surprise you. Most assume that transaction data takes up most of the data usage, but announcing said transactions and propagating them throughout the network. Typically, Internet Service Providers cap the bandwidth of data that can flow through your router, and if you run a Bitcoin node with port 8333 open without limiting the number of peers that can connect to you, the bandwidth limits instituted by your ISP can be hit quickly, slowing down your Internet or making it more expensive as you go over the limit. This is not ideal for the long-term stability of being able to run a full node, especially as the chain continues to grow. So, seeing innovations like Minisketch (which will be used outside of Bitcoin as well) are extremely encouraging.
The best part, it's "backward compatible" in the sense that it doesn't entail an upgrade to the protocol. It can be slowly rolled out at a pace that is comfortable for individual node operators. Very little friction in making this happen.
We'll be following development very intently here at the Ƀent as Minisketch is built out. One thing I will remind you freaks of is that I'm not the most technically literate Bitcoiner, so if any of you out there have any objections or tradeoffs you'd like to make Uncle Marty aware of, please don't hesitate to email me or respond on Twitter.
Final thought...
Food poisoning can fuck off.
