OK! This sounds great!!
@sickpig: since you're interested in setting up and maintaining the node(s), you're probably a much better person to do this than I am.
@theZerg: I agree that we should do this to practice the BU handling of the funds. If you set up a multisig donation address, I will donate the 0.836 BTC that I referred to earlier.
Here is a first draft at a project plan / announcement.
Improving Block Propagation through the Great Firewall of China with X-technology
A Bitcoin Unlimited Initiative
TL/DR: the goal of the project is to setup Bitcoin Unlimited nodes including within mainland China and exploit Xthin to create a fast block relay through the Great Firewall. If you would like to contribute to the hosting cost of these nodes, please consider donating to the project's wallet at <3xxxxxxxx>.
The release of
Xtreme Thin Blocks and Xpress Validation in
Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) 0.12 has provided new opportunities to significantly improve the propagation of blocks across Bitcoin's peer-to-peer network.
@Peter Tschipper's X-technology leverages the fact that most transactions included in a solved block are already known by most network nodes (common mempools). Rather than requesting the solved block verbatim, the receiving node images its mempool onto a Bloom filter that its sends with its get-data request. The transmitting node sends the block contents by hash for all the transactions imaged onto the Bloom filter, and in full otherwise.
Empirical testing shows that this technique reduces the total number of bytes transmitted by a factor of 15X under normal operating conditions.
Nowhere is the efficient propagation of blocks more important than across the Great Firewall of China (GFC). For example,
experiments in the fall of 2015 by
@jtoomim showed that although 4MB blocks could often be communicated and verified in 7 seconds (per hop), when the block had to penetrate the GFC, this figure increased to between 15 to 150 seconds. Indeed, the difficulty in propagating blocks through the GFC is arguably one of the most significant bottlenecks to on-chain scaling.
The goal of this project is to setup and maintain a small network of BU nodes across the world, with a particular focus on setting up nodes inside and outside of mainland China, and to perform experiments to quantify the improvements that X-technology permits. We suspect that the average amount of time required to communicate each megabyte of block information can be dramatically reduced. Should the results be positive, this small network of BU nodes could grow into an "Xtreme Relay Network," eventually replacing the centralized and less-robust Fast Relay Network, and permitting an order-of-magntitude or greater increase in Bitcoin's transactional throughput.
If you would like to contribute to this initiative, please consider donating to the project's wallet at <3xxxxxx>. All funds are administered by ______, in accordance with Article 3 of
Bitcoin Unlimited's Articles of Federation.
