Re: [Bitcoin-development] Protocol extensions

[Andy Parkins <andyparkins@gmail.com>]

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On 2011 December 21 Wednesday, Christian Decker wrote:

> Supernodes will be those nodes that verify all transactions and make them
> available to miners. Since miners will become more and more specialized
> these supernodes are likely to be owned by the miners themself. To be a
> miner either you need to verify all the transactions you include (otherwise
> others might be able to find an error in your block and thus drop it) or
> have someone that verifies them for you. In the end I think we'll end up
> with a hierarchical network, with the miners/supernodes tighly
> interconnected at the top and the lightweight clients that simply verify
> transactions (or their inputs to be precise) that are destined for them at
> the bottom.

A thought occurred to me.  We already run a decentralised system, but it's 
done by making everyone duplicate all other work.  There is no fundamental 
reason why all work needs to be duplicated though.  What about this: every 
node randomly chooses whether to verify any particular transaction.  If we 
assume the network is large and the random factor is correctly chosen, then we 
can still guarantee that every transaction is verified.  Then, we simply add a 
protocol message that is a negative-announce transaction.  That is to say, we 
give nodes a way of telling other nodes that they think a transaction is 
invalid.  The other nodes are then free to verify _that_ assertion and forward 
the negative-announce.

Miners can then listen for negative-announcements and use them to decide were 
to dedicate their verification efforts.  They then don't need to verify all 
(or perhaps even any) transactions themselves and can dedicate their 
processing power to mining.

(I've actually mentioned this idea before, but that time I was using it as a 
double-spend prevention method).



Andy

-- 
Dr Andy Parkins
andyparkins@gmail.com

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