> Personally I consider this counterproductive. Apart from the complexity, it’s not healthy. And the chain grows linearly with storage cost falling exponentially, leading to a straightforward conclusion.

The motivation for this change is not to encourage full archival nodes to prune, but to make it possible for pruned nodes to beef up what kind of archive they retain. Personally I think using the falling storage costs as a means of providing access to more users is more important than using it to justify requiring higher node requirements.

> Something to consider adding to this proposal is to keep the idea of pruning - i.e. retain a sequentially uninterrupted number of the most recent blocks.
>
> Many users do not run a node for entirely altruistic reasons - they do so, at least in part, because it allows them to use their wallets privately. Without this ability, I think the number of users willing to run their node in this configuration might be reduced.
>
> Another related thought is to have a decreasing density over blocks over time as you go backwards towards genesis, in order for the data density of the storage to match the actual usage of the network, in which (I would imagine) more recent blocks are more heavily requested than early ones.

Per my above comments, this change is actually capitalizing primarily upon those who wish to do it for more altruistic reasons. Furthermore, doing linear block scans when you need to query blocks that you don't keep does not leak privacy details in the same way that bloom filters do. You are not signaling to the peer that there is something specific in that block that you care about, because you don't actually know. You are signalling only that you do not have that block right now, which from the other parts of the design you are already leaking. In light of this, I don't think that it is necessary for the blocks to be in sequential sets at all. If there is no requirement on them being sequential, uniform randomness will take care of the density problem automatically.

Keagan


On Mon, Mar 1, 2021 at 4:20 AM Eric Voskuil via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

On Sun, Feb 28, 2021 at 10:18 AM Leo Wandersleb via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

 

> Only headers need to be downloaded sequentially so downloading relevant blocks from one node is totally possible with gaps in between.

 

In fact this is exactly how libbitcoin v4 works. We download and store blocks in parallel. In the case of a restart block gaps are repopulated. Given that headers are validated, we go after the most responsive nodes. Based on standard deviation, we drop the slowest peers and rebalance load to new/empty channels. We make ordered but not necessarily sequential requests. There is no distinction between “initial” block download, a restart, or a single or few blocks at the top. So it’s referred to as continuous parallel block download.

 

But we don’t prune. Personally I consider this counterproductive. Apart from the complexity, it’s not healthy. And the chain grows linearly with storage cost falling exponentially, leading to a straightforward conclusion.

 

e

_______________________________________________
bitcoin-dev mailing list
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev