Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Service bits for pruned nodes

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2013 23:55:23 -0400

On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 03:48:18AM +0000, John Dillon wrote:
> We can build this stuff incrementally I'll agree. It won't be the case that one
> in a thousand nodes serve up the part of the chain you need overnight. So many
> I am over engineering the solution with BitTorrent.

I think that pretty much sums it up.

With the block-range served in the anounce message you just need to find
an annoucement with the right range, and at worst connect to a few more
node to get what you need. It will be a long time before the bandwidth
used for finding a node with the part of the chain that you need is a
significant fraction of the load required for downloading the data
itself.

Remember that BitTorrent's DHT is a system giving you access to tens of
petabytes worth of data. The Bitcoin blockchain on the other hand simply
can't grow more than 57GiB per year. It's a cute idea though.

Also, while we're talking about the initial download:

http://blockchainbymail.com

Lots of options out there.

-- 
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org