Second Look at Weak Blocks

[instagibbs]

@mcelrath

. This way just the TX plus some metadata could be propagated in INV instead of entire weak blocks.

I think this begs the question a bit: We don’t know which transactions we need to forward to peers that ostensibly have different policies. Deciding what to forward seems hard. If we can predict it, just relay it in prefilled txn with the real compact block?

edit: I could see it where subsequent weak blocks may carry less info per link, at least. Further bandwidth optimization perhaps.

@mcelrath

Meaning up to 35x more weak-compact-blocks than bitcoin blocks. Using 32kb per compact block that’s 1.1MB additional bandwidth between blocks for these messages, plus the missing transactions.

Seems pretty reasonable for an opt-in measure assuming the problem is real and solution effective.