Bitcoin Improvement Proposal Could Help Transaction Bandwidth To Be Reduced

Bitcoin (BTC) developers continue to work and think about how to improve the whole network. This time, Bitcoin Core developers Dr. Pieter Wuille and Greg Maxwell decided to create a new Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) that could reduce transaction bandwidth. In order to do so, it will be necessary to develop a relay protocol.

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal To Reduce Transaction Bandwidth

The BIP is also known as Erlay and it has received contributions from Gleb Naumenko, a recognized researcher a the University of Columbia. The proposal explains hat it will be reducing the bandwidth required to process Bitcoin transactions by 75%.

Naumenko explained in a recent email that was sent to CoinDesk:

“The main idea [behind Erlay] is that instead of announcing every transaction to every peer [on the Bitcoin network], announcements are only sent directly over a small number of connections (only 8 outgoing ones). Further relay is achieved by periodically running a set reconciliation protocol over every connection between the sets of withheld announcements in both directions.”

It is worth mentioning that Naumenko is also a former software engineer at Blockstream. Implementing this solution will not only reduce the bandwidth to process a Bitcoin transaction but also Bitcoin network nodes will save half of the bandwidth as well.

This BIP is expected to allow Bitcoin network nodes to increase the number of active connection they have with other nodes. Nevertheless, this would be possible only when Erlay is integrated into the Bitcoin protocol.

Bitcoin’s security is also related to how decentralized the network is through its nodes. With Erlay, it will be possible for the Bitcoin network to have increased security. This could make it more difficult for malicious attacks to affect the whole network.

Naumenko said that the most trivial example is an Eclipse attack when a target node gets isolated from the longest chain. The connections are established with an attacker that can make a target node believe that they paid that target node, without actually submitting transactions to the longest chain.

Nonetheless, before being able to integrate this improvement, it is necessary to perform more experiments and testing.

Currently, Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency in the market in terms of valuation. It has a market capitalization of $150 billion and a price of over $8,500. At the same time, the digital currency has registered an increased hash rate over the last few months.

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