Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Compressed Bitcoin Transactions

From: Tom Briar <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2024 21:09:35 +0000

Hi Jonas,

As it turns out, most of our size savings come from eliminating unneeded hashes and public keys, which get recovered on decompression. gzip actually expands transactions due to the way it attempts to compress pseudorandom data, my numbers show a legacy transaction of 222 bytes being expanded to 267 bytes.

gzip can possibly shrink the 4-byte integers which have only a couple typical values, and can eliminate some of the "boilerplate" in the tx format, but that's pretty much it at the expense of expanding the signatures, public keys, and hashes.

And your absolutely right this would have to be done at the application layer in a V2-P2P encrypted traffic system.

Thanks-
Tom.