According to Jameson Lopp (https://www.coindesk.com/spv-support-billion-bitcoin-users-sizing-scaling-claim/), allowing pruned nodes to advertise that they support BIP 37 would be impossible without "extensive protocol changes." What changes would make this possible?
Asked
Active
Viewed 128 times
1 Answers
3
Pruned peers do not have the full blockchain history and therefore have only limited value for SPV clients.
With Bitcoin Core 0.16, pruned peers will announce their service via NODE_NETWORK_LIMITED (see BIP159). BIP159 is not a consensus change.
This will allow SPV clients to connect to pruned peers. But, since they only signal for the last 288 blocks, SPV/BIP37 clients interested to load history older than 1 day of blocks would still require to connect to traditional peers.
In the future, pruned nodes may have a way to signal how many blocks they will keep on disk (without adding a fingerprinting vulnerability).
Note that BIP37 is a controversial concept. It has significant privacy downsides (see Jonas Nick's research).
A far better concept is "Client side filtering". See the upcoming BIP157 and BIP158.
Murch
- 75,206
- 34
- 186
- 622
Jonas Schnelli
- 6,052
- 1
- 21
- 34