Data compression adds latency and reduces predictability, so engineers have decided to leave compression to application layers instead of transport layer or lower in order to let the application designer decide what tradeoffs to make. On Nov 11, 2015, at 10:49 AM, Marco Pontello via bitcoin-dev wrote: > A random thought: aren't most communication over a data link already compressed, at some point? > When I used a modem, we had the V.42bis protocol. Now, nearly all ADSL connections using PPPoE, surely are. And so on. > I'm not sure another level of generic, data agnostic kind of compression will really give us some real-life practical advantage over that. > > Something that could take advantage of of special knowledge of the specific data, instead, would be an entirely different matter. > > Just my 2c.