I would expect that since a block contains mostly hashes and crypto signatures, it would be almost totally incompressible. I just calculated compression ratios:
zlib -15% (file is LARGER) gzip 28% bzip2 25% So zlib compression is right out. How much is ~25% bandwidth savings worth to people? This seems not worth it to me. :-/ Peter Tschipper via bitcoin-dev [bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org] wrote: > This is my first time through this process so please bear with me. > > I opened a PR #6973 this morning for Zlib Block Compression for block > relay and at the request of @sipa this should have a BIP associated > with it. The idea is simple, to compress the datastream before > sending, initially for blocks only but it could theoretically be done > for transactions as well. Initial results show an average of 20% block > compression and taking 90 milliseconds for a full block (on a very slow > laptop) to compress. The savings will be mostly in terms of less > bandwidth used, but I would expect there to be a small performance gain > during the transmission of the blocks particularly where network latency > is higher. > > I think the BIP title, if accepted should be the more generic, "Support > for Datastream Compression" rather than the PR title of "Zlib > Compression for block relay" since it could also be used for > transactions as well at a later time. > > Thanks for your time... > _______________________________________________ > bitcoin-dev mailing list > bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev > > > !DSPAM:5640ff47206804314022622! -- Cheers, Bob McElrath "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
