The new Bitcoin improvement proposal could reduce transaction bandwidth by 75%

Pieter Wuille and Greg Maxwell, two prominent developers of Bitcoin Core, have drafted a proposal for Bitcoin Improvement (BIP), which involves developing a relay protocol that effectively reduces the size of the bitcoin. "Transaction bandwidth" used by the Bitcoin Network (BTC).

Nicknamed Erlay, the BIP was also developed with contributions from Gleb Naumenko, a researcher at the University of British Columbia. According to the proposal specifications, its activation will reduce by approximately 75% the bandwidth required to process bitcoin transactions.

Recording of "75% overall bandwidth compared to the current Bitcoin protocol"

As Naumenko explains in an email sent to CoinDesk:

The main idea [behind Erlay] is it instead of announcing each transaction to each peer [on the Bitcoin network], ads are only sent directly to a small number of connections (only 8 outgoing). The additional relay is performed by periodically executing a set reconciliation protocol on each connection between sets of two-way ads.

Naumenko, a former Blockstream software engineer, also mentioned that the implementation of the new BIP "would save half the bandwidth" used by Bitcoin network nodes. In addition, the integration of Erlay will "increase connectivity almost for free and, as a side effect, to better withstand timing attacks," Naumenko said.

He added that if the "number of outgoing peers in the BTC channel chain were increased to 32", Erlay could "save about 75% of the overall bandwidth compared to the current protocol".

As noted by the authors of the BIP, the last BIP has had the important result of allowing Bitcoin network nodes to increase their number of active connections with other nodes. The developers of the proposal noted that this would be possible if / when Erlay was embedded in the Bitcoin protocol.

Hardening of the Bitcoin registry against attacks

Currently, the security of the Bitcoin blockchain depends, to a certain extent, on the participating nodes of the decentralized network. Erlay could potentially increase the number of connections between cryptocurrency platform nodes, protocol developers believe that it will "harden" the bitcoin blockchain against malicious attacks.

As detailed by Naumenko:

The most trivial example is the Eclipse attack, when a target node is isolated from the longest chain because all of its connections are made with an attacker. In this case, an attacker, for example, can make a target node believe that it has paid for this target node (display a shorter string with that string). [transaction] in), without actually submitting the transactions to the longest chain.

Commenting further on how and when Erlay could be added to the Bitcoin Core code base, Naumenko said he had discussed the PIF with several other Bitcoin developers. He revealed that the reactions he received were "generally positive". However, most contributors to BTC believe that more experiments and tests are needed before integrating Erlay into Bitcoin's core code.