Aug 16, 2026

The CPU increase was 47%. I optimized the encryption a bit, and vectorized it using our SIMD abstractions. This reduced it to +22% on AVX2, and AVX512 should cut that in half again. In any case, the continuous encryption is obviously not the free win that the bip324 authors speculated it would be. That was based on assumptions of scalar sha implementation (rare these days) and falsely on the necessity of retaining that message checksum. It's a large amount of additional processing, so if you want max full validation sync speed, leave it off.