Re: [Bitcoin-development] Economics of information propagation

[Mark Friedenbach <mark@monetize.io>]

Yes, it certainly can be improved in this way. You can even extend the
idea to distribute partial proofs of work (block headers + Merkle lists
which represent significant but not sufficient work), and 'prime' your
memory pools with the transactions contained within.

This is, btw, basically what p2pool does, which is why last time I
calculated you get roughly 1% better return from p2pool than a zero-fee
mining pool would get you, specifically because of the lower stale rate.

On 04/21/2014 09:22 AM, Paul Lyon wrote:
> I haven't done the math on this, so it may be a terrible idea. :)
> 
> I've been wondering if block propagation times could also be improved by
> allowing peers to request the list of transaction hashes that make up a
> block, and then making a follow-up request to only download any
> transactions not currently known. I'm not sure what percentage of
> transactions a node will usually already have when it receives a new
> block, but if it's high I figure this could be beneficial.
>