Bitcoin Core fully supports BIP152, and high bandwidth mode greatly improves block propagation speed

Bitcoin Core, the open source project that maintains and publishes Bitcoin client software, has fully agreed to the BIP152 update plan, which will reduce the bandwidth used to transmit new blocks on full nodes. This can significantly reduce the propagation time of blocks throughout the Bitcoin network.

The Bitcoin Core team has published a FAQ regarding recent Bitcoin Improvement Protocols (BIPs). People are currently discussing BIP152, or Compact Block Relay, an update that is set to reduce bandwidth and the time it takes for blocks to propagate through nodes on the Bitcoin network.

This update incorporates several techniques to reduce the time it takes for blocks to propagate across the network. The general idea is to take advantage of the fact that all nodes have similar data in their memory pools, and then a node only needs to send a 'thumbnail' of the block to the next node, which saves bandwidth because the entire block does not need to be sent.

The block thumbnail will include the first 80 bytes of block data and shortened transaction identifiers, and may also send some other transaction IDs.

The Bitcoin Core team responded in the BIP152 FAQ:

“The advantage of BIP152 is that, in the best case, transactions only need to be sent once — when the transaction is initially broadcast — which greatly reduces overall bandwidth consumption.”

Update the baseline for the program

This upgrade also has a new feature - high-bandwidth mode, where nodes can request other nodes to participate in the propagation of the same block to reduce latency, but at the cost of slightly higher bandwidth usage.

The new approach has been benchmarked to the point where a typical 1MB block containing 2,500 transactions only requires 15KB of data to be transmitted, and 86% of blocks can be propagated immediately without requesting any other missing transactions.

The Bitcoin Core team said BIP152 will benefit the entire network.

“Reducing block propagation time on P2P networks helps create a healthier network and a better baseline for delivering security margins.”

The implementation of BIP152 is feasible and is currently being tested by the developer community. Future improvements to BIP152 may include using the UDP transport protocol instead of the TCP protocol and using an error correction mechanism to handle abandoned packets. In short, the Bitcoin community has always welcomed these types of improvements because they can help Bitcoin become more robust.