[Bitcoin-development] SmartSPV – A better Simplified Payment Verification for Smartphones

[Bitcoin-development] SmartSPV – A better Simplified Payment Verification for Smartphones

[Sergio Lerner]

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In a previous e-mail Mike Hearn asked me how I was going to handle 17K
block headers a day in my NimbleCoin currency in a the SPV mode.
I designed a variation of the standard headers-only SPV mode I called
SmartSPV. This mode could also be implemented by BitcoinJ for Bitcoin.

The method is explained here:
http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/smartspv-a-better-simplified-payment-verification-for-smartphones/

But I copy the whole blog post in this e-mail so you don't need to click
on it.


    SmartSPV – A better Simplified Payment Verification for Smartphones

NimbleCoin <http://NimbleCoin.com> is a new cryptocurrency I’ll be
hopefully launching soon. One of its nice features is that it uses the
FastBlock5
<http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/5-sec-block-interval/> protocol
(a 5 seconds block interval) to achieve near instant payments. Because
NimbleCoin also implements merged mining
<http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/safe-merged-mining/>, each
block header can be as large as 700 bytes (including Merkle branch and
coinbase transaction). Yesterday Mike Hearn asked my a difficult
question: how would NimbleCoin SPV nodes (such as the ones running on
smartphones) process tons of headers if the bandwidth is limited or the
clients are disconnected from the Internet for long periods?

The answer is Smart-SPV, a variation of the standard SPV headers-only
<https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Thin_Client_Security> mode that allows a
smartphone to keep a fairly accurate state of the wallet balance without
downloading all the missing headers and without sacrificing battery life
and time.

Headers-only SPV clients
<http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/11054/understanding-spv-simple-payment-verification>
downloads a complete copy of the headers for all blocks in the entire
blockchain but not all the transactions. In order to update the user
wallet, SPV clients ask their peers to filter those blocks that contains
transactions that the SPV is interested in, such as those that have
payments to their own bitcoin addresses. This is done using bloom
filters <https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0037.mediawiki>.

In Smart-SPV mode, when a client is missing block headers two things
happen simultaneously:

1. The client starts downloading block headers from the last one solved
backwards.

2. The client starts downloading the blocks headers from the first
missing header, forward.

While the client catches up with all the missing blocks, the wallet
balance may not be fully reliable. Nevertheless if a new payment is
received and confirmed, or a new payment is made, the wallet will
increased the balance and show it. This is what the user expects.

*How it works*

A live block is a block which is the last block of the block-chain and
it’s received on time (it has a time-stamp near the current time). Each
time a live block is received, it is flagged as LIVE and this flag is
stored permanently with the block.  A live transaction is a transaction
that is included in a live block. When a live transaction is confirmed
by 6 blocks flagged as LIVE the transaction is considered mature. A
mature transaction may be included in a block that is still orphan. All
mature transactions are scanned and used to compute the balance of the
wallet. Also all transactions that are included in blocks rooted at the
last checkpoint and finishing in the last live block are also considered
mature (this is the standard condition). Since the wallet always
modifies the balance according to mature transactions, an payment is
received and acknowledged even if the branch where it is included is
still orphaned. If the SPV client clock is correctly synchronized, the
Smart-SPV protocol does not pose any additional security risk different
from the known SPV limitations.







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Re: [Bitcoin-development] SmartSPV – A better Simplified Payment Verification for Smartphones

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 9:52 PM, Sergio Lerner
<sergiolerner@certimix.com> wrote:
> In a previous e-mail Mike Hearn asked me how I was going to handle 17K block
> headers a day in my NimbleCoin currency in a the SPV mode.
> I designed a variation of the standard headers-only SPV mode I called
> SmartSPV. This mode could also be implemented by BitcoinJ for Bitcoin.

If you are freely specifying things, and you control the headers than
you can can already make SPV evaluations of work have log(n) scaling.

See: https://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg04318.html


(wrt headers in reverse, perhaps you might also want to mine
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/Reverse_header-fetching_sync
for ideas).