Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] [BIP Draft] Datastream compression of Blocks and Transactions

From: Gavin Andresen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2015 14:14:55 -0500

On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 1:57 PM, Emin Gün Sirer <
[email-masked]> 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