Bitcoin node synchronization would be impossible if it were not for the improvements that have been made to the software, according to the research arm of crypto exchange BitMex.
BitMex Research measured the Initial Block Download times of Bitcoin Core software releases from 2012 to 2019 needed to download the blockchain and verify it and shared their conclusions in a blog post published on Nov. 29.
"Older versions of Bitcoin struggled to get past the pickup in transaction volume which occurred in the 2015 to 2016 period. Therefore we conclude that without the software enhancements, an initial synchronization today could be almost impossible."
Bitcoin initial block download time in days - an average of three attempts.
"We then even tried running Bitcoin Core 0.7.0 on our brand new local machine, with 64 GB of RAM and 8 Intel i9 processors the node was still unable to get past 2016. The large reductions in IBD times and the inability of old nodes to fully synchronize indicate that if it were not for these scalability enhancements, by now Bitcoin would be essentially dead, even if users had the highest specification hardware available."
The most significant improvement in speed took place after Bitcoin Core version 0.12.0 when developers adopted a signature verification library purpose-built for Bitcoin in place of a standard one.
Interestingly, until Bitcoin Core 0.14.0 the scalability improvements seemingly kept the pace and maintained the sync times in a relatively narrow time range.
After those initial releases, the popularity of the Bitcoin network and its size started to grow much faster than scalability improvements made to the software, resulting in longer sync times.
Currently, the size of the Bitcoin blockchain is 293.37GB, with an average block size of just over 1 megabyte.
As Cointelegraph recently reported, the latest Bitcoin Core software update, 0.19.0.1, further improves on scalability by using Bech32 that natively supports SegWit transactions.
Scalability Enhancements Kept Bitcoin Decentralized: BitMex Research
gepubliceerd op Nov 30, 2019
by Cointele | gepubliceerd op Coinage
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