Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Fees and the block-finding process

From: Dave Hudson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2015 16:33:16 -0400

> On 7 Aug 2015, at 16:17, Ryan Butler via bitcoin-dev <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> A raspberry pie 2 node on reasonable Internet connection with a reasonable hard drive can run a node with 8 or 20mb blocks easily.
> 
I'm curious as I've not seen any data on this subject. How fast can a RP2 do the necessary cryptographic calculations to validate blocks of various sizes?

While everyone tends to talk in terms of 10 minutes per block that is, of course, only a typical time and doesn't account for situations in which 2 or more blocks are found in quick succession (which, of course, happens on a daily basis). At what point does, say, an RP2 node fail to be able to validate a second or third block because it's still not finished processing the first?

If someone were to be playing games with the system and mining transactions without first broadcasting them to the network then how long would that take? This would in essence define the ability to DoS lower-performance nodes (ignoring all of the other usual considerations such as bandwidth, etc).