Eight months after presenting a case for Graphene as a solution to the bitcoin cash blockchain’s scalability issue, Bitcoin Unlimited has unveiled its block compression utility that takes care of excessive blockchain bandwidth usage. Presented in November 2017 at a developers conference, Graphene uses what has been described as “crazy math” to reduce a 1MB block to 2.6KB, potentially revolutionizing the entire Bitcoin transaction space.
What Is Graphene?
BTCManager reported in November 2017 that Bitcoin Unlimited presented its roadmap for scaling bitcoin cash in the mid-term future as a developers conference in London. Team lead Gavin Andresen laid out a framework for addressing scalability issues by sending nodes instructions for building data blocks based on existing information, instead of the data-hungry process of transmitting whole blocks to blockchain nodes.
Peter Rizun, a principal developer on the Bitcoin Unlimited team, describes it as the “crazy math” of Invertible Bloom lookup Tables (IBLTs). He recently explained the IBLT concept to Trust Nodes:
“In Graphene, when a node requests a block from a peer, the node sends the size of its mempool (rather than a Bloom filter of its mempool as was the case with Xthin [ Xtreme Thin Blocks] ).”
A decentralized network is a group of computers called nodes where each node has the same capability, hence taking the name of “peers” and when data is moved from one node to another, it’s called block propagation. Graphene can help blockchains combat the latency in block propagation.
Source/More: Graphene Compression Merger May Be the Solution to Bitcoin Scalability Issue | BTCMANAGER