Bitcoin full node and query server

Nov 5, 2024

View in context in the libbitcoin Slack #general mirror.

evoskuil20:49

My personal view on the role of a Bitcoin node is that its primary purpose is to validate and propagate new blocks as quickly as possible, such that all nodes and miners on the network can quickly come to agreement on what the longest/heaviest PoW chain is. This is why I favour the Block based data model.

I would say we optimize for a single miner to obtain and process new blocks as fast as possible in order to be most profitable via efficient regeneration and optimization of block templates. I don't think it will be the case that Satoshi's architecture will be shown to be more optimal at doing that, but we have a long way to go. Certainly BN is not just designed just to get started quickly, though we see that as critical to people actually using Bitcoin. Sync times are getting to the absurd, and despite linear chain growth are not improving with exponential hardware and bandwidth growth. But certainly for the miner side of the economy, rapid and optimal block template generation and dissemination is the priority.

josie18:39

I would say we optimize for a single miner to obtain and process new blocks as fast as possible in order to be most profitable via efficient regeneration and optimization of block templates. I don't think it will be the case that Satoshi's architecture will be shown to be more optimal at doing that, but we have a long way to go.

i havent had time to fully flesh out my thinking on this, but i do think there is a strong argument for a "blocks" based architecture vs a transaction based architecture. but, as i mentioned in the delving post, i think they serve very different use cases. ideally, some architecture will emerge that can strike some happy middle ground between the two