This document is part-3 of the series of articles on scaling Bitcoin, I recommend reading part-2 on block propagation before continuing with this paper. Preface This paper takes a simple yet practical approach to building scalable software; puts to use the Fundamental Theorem of Software Engineering i.e. “We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection” & other often used software design paradigms. It is an attempt to derive a robust & scalable distributed system architecture which devolves crucial responsibilities to appropriate components. Although the new distributed node architecture is a departure from the legacy monolithic one, it ensures there is no impact to any of the consensus rules of the original Bitcoin protocol (Bitcoin SV). The design that follows attempts to solve a number of issues; Parallel Transaction Verification & mempool acceptance, Parallel Block processing, UTxO set sharding, Parallel Merkle root validation among many other crucial items. In part-2 a novel high-compression low-latency block propagation protocol was introduced and it forms an essential component to the below architecture. Besides this paper introduces a couple of new concepts (perspectives) as well. Performing well at scale typically involves multiple aspects i.e. horizontally scalable system, high availability, load balancers, […]

This solution paper is a sequel to my earlier post on reddit Bitcoin-SV: are terabyte blocks feasible?, I recommend reading that article first as it deals with requirements scoping & feasibility before continuing this paper. Abstract: A node, alongside its mempool, now maintains a ‘stateful’ index of unconfirmed transactions exchanged with each of its peers. So each node maintains a map of seqNo<->transactionIDs for every active peer connection. Currently when a miner succeeds in the mining attempt, i.e. the nonce that produces the hash less than the network difficulty it transmits the entire contents of the block (legacy or Compact blocks BIP-152) to its peers. In this proposal the miner can efficiently (in space & time) transmit a packed block containing the sequence of indices to its peer. The peer unpacks the block, effectively reconstructing the ordered set of transactions contained in the block. A node can relay the received block to another downstream peer by repacking the block (individually per peer) and transmitting the same. In Depth: Since peers are in an asynchronous network, and transactions (inbound & outbound) are disseminated highly concurrently through the network, it is necessary to ensure there are no index collisions, to avoid ambiguity […]

In the not so distant future, when Bitcoin is ubiquitous, the digital communication ecosystem would be completely reinvented. It is possible that Bitcoin economic model will breathe new life into decades old comm. technologies and protocols that never really took off or were stagnating. At the same time it will open up avenues for a plethora of new services and features that will streamline and simplify things for everyone involved. Before we dive into the future of digital communications, lets review the current state of the blockchain ecosystem and weed out some possible misconceptions. In the last decade (half actually) we had a Cambrian-explosion of public blockchains/ consensus protocols/ crypto-currencies (coins/ tokens) how many of these will survive & thrive in the coming years? we have arguments at both extremes of the spectrum, some say (maximalists) eventually there will be a single winning blockchain “winner takes all” by comparing blockchains to TCP/IP or Internet. And on the other end, many envision there will be hundreds if not thousands of Blockchains (and tokens) substantiated by – a single blockchain cannot possibly meet the needs of all the different entities (biz./govts./indiv.) & use cases, some even include scaling limitations as a factor, […]