On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 1:57 PM, Emin Gün Sirer <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

How to Do It

If we want to compress Bitcoin, a programming challenge/contest would be one of the best ways to find the best possible, Bitcoin-specific compressor. This is the kind of self-contained exercise that bright young hackers love to tackle. It'd bring in new programmers into the ecosystem, and many of us would love to discover the limits of compressibility for Bitcoin bits on a wire. And the results would be interesting even if the final compression engine is not enabled by default, or not even merged.

I love this idea. Lets build a standardized data set to test against using real data from the network (has anybody done this yet?).

Something like:

Starting network topology:

list of: nodeid, nodeid, network latency between the two peers

Changes to network topology:

list of: nodeid, add/remove nodeid, time of change

Transaction broadcasts:

list of : transaction, node id that first broadcast, time first broadcast

Block broadcasts:

list of : block, node id that first broadcast, time first broadcast

Proposed transaction/block optimizations could then be measured against this standard data set.

--
Gavin Andresen