Dear Bitcoin developers, In brief, the proposal I have is to extend the protocol to allow partial block download and upload. This is for people with intermittent connectivity or restricted connectivity. e.g. my own internet connection is quite slow, and my ISP routinely sends RSTs to both sides of connections to severe them. This often happens during block download and upload. I also often encounter the reception of blocks I have already received, further wasting bandwidth. This happens as quite often it can be far more than 2 minutes before block reception occurs following the getdata request, by which time my node has already sent a new getdata to another node requesting the same block.
My proposal is that in addition to the size (which is advertised in the header), the hash is also advertised in the header (of a block). This would help nodes to determine whether they wanted to reject the download. (e.g. if it already had a block matching that hash). This of course wouldn't prevent a rogue node from sending an incorrect hash, but this would aid in saving bandwidth amongst behaving nodes. The other part of the proposal is to allow nodes to request upload and download blocks that have already been partially downloaded. This could be done by modifying the existing methods of upload, download, or by adding a new method, perhaps even using HTTP/HTTPS or something similar. This would also help nodes to obtain the blockchain who have restrictive ISPs, especially if they are being served on port 80 or 443. This could perhaps also allow web caches to keep caches of the blockchain, thereby making it also more available also. Currently, without this functionality, nodes with restrictive (or slow) internet have some options, such as going via a tor proxy, but due to the latency, the problem with multiple receptions of the same block still occur. Hopefully, not too clueless a post for my first post to this mailing list. Regards, Ed ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
