Second Look at Weak Blocks

P.S. If anyone is wondering how this applies to Braidpool, we HAVE to do this, because weak blocks are shares, and the valid share requirement includes a valid block requirement, so we HAVE to send weak-compact blocks for every share, and validate an entire block with every share, which might occur as fast as once per second. (Kaspa is achieving sub-second block times)

However the overhead of this could be substantial, and ideas for optimizations are welcome. BIP152 is already pretty efficient, but we have the advantage that previous weak-blocks (beads) named as parents can be expected to already be known to the receiver, and all txs must have already been mined in an ancestor weak-block.

I don’t want to put this overhead on bitcoin though, and only miners/centralized pools should do it with beefier hardware and networking. Therefore we’re planning on a completely separate p2p network for this. If some variant of weak blocks ends up on Bitcoin though, we will use it.

Cheers, – Bob

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