Thanks for the reply. My understanding is that the bitcoin relay network is a backbone of connected high speed servers to increase the rate at which transactions and new blocks propagate - and remove a number of delays in processing. But it would still require the miners to download the entire block before building on top of it with any degree of confidence. With a tweak to only send the required information for other miners to build on top of that block, this is a step towards what we propose, yet would require trust that the header information sent is accurate. The bitcoin relay network website states that blocks are not fully verified and should be checked by the miners before building on top of them.

What we propose is more complex (granted!), yet that complexity serves a purpose. We reduce (and hopefully eliminate) the adverse incentive to entice miners to build on inaccurate data. This is achieved by making the financial losses of fake messages outweigh the financial gains of such attack vectors. It could also help in the block size debate if this proposed solution would eliminate the disadvantages of large blocks.

On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 1:27 PM, Matt Corallo <lf-lists@mattcorallo.com> wrote:

See-also: Bitcoinrelaynetwork.org. It's already in use my the majority of large miners, is publicly available to anyone, and the protocol is rather simple and the client could be tweaked easily to keep exactly it's block ready to quickly relay to the nearest server (ie only have to relay the header, the coinbase transaction, and only small other data... Experience shows this is really easy to fit into one packet on the wire). It's not nearly as complicated as your suggestion, but may still marginally favor well-connected miners, but hopefully not much (when you're taking about single packets, it should all be latency, and the servers are well distributed). If you feel so inclined, there are some todos to make it really meet is efficiency limits filled on github.com/TheBlueMatt/RelayNode, feel free to rewrite the protocol if you really want :).

Matt
On August 5, 2015 9:07:44 PM GMT+02:00, Arnoud Kouwenhoven - Pukaki Corp via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
Hello all.

We’d like to share an idea we have to dramatically increase the bitcoin block propagation speed after a new block has been mined for the first time.

Efficient bitcoin block propagation
A proposed solution to provide near-instantaneous block propagation on the bitcoin network, even with slow network connections or large block sizes. Increasing mining efficiency for everyone while decreasing transaction confirmation times and strengthening the distributed nature of bitcoin.

Short summary: we propose to introduce bitcoin-backed guarantees (“Guarantee Messages”) between miners. This would allow miners to mine on blocks that are not yet fully transmitted. This reduces the effect of slow internet connections, leveling the playing field between the 1st world fiberoptic datacenter miners and the rest of the world. We also believe it strengthens the bitcoin network by using existing processing power that is currently wasted into further securing the blockchain, and it reduces the likelihood of transactions becoming confirmed, then unconfirmed and then -hopefully- confirmed again (due to different miners finding competing blocks with different transactions at approx the same time).

It is possible to implement our idea as a fork of bitcoind, or as layer between the standard bitcoind and the mining equipment. In the future it could be incorporated in the bitcoin core if and when that becomes a priority, but that step would not make sense until it becomes a priority.

There are a lot of nuances in this idea, and the first reaction is quite probably that this is a crazy idea. We have attempted to address the most important nuances in our proposal, which is currently at v.0.2.

We cannot guarantee that there are no ‘hidden devils in the details’ and we invite you to be critical in a friendly and constructive manner. We will do our best to answer all questions that arise.

The ‘official’ proposal is at:
PDF: http://pukaki.bz/efficient-bitcoin-block-propagation-v.0.2.pdf
HTML: http://pukaki.bz/efficient-bitcoin-block-propagation-v.0.2.html

-- Arnoud Kouwenhoven
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