Abstract
We devise a novel method of interactive set reconciliation for efficient block distribution. Our approach, called Graphene, couples a Bloom filter with an IBLT. We evaluate performance analytically and show that Graphene blocks are always smaller. For example, while a 17.5 KB Xtreme Thinblock can be encoded in 10 KB with Compact Blocks, the same information can be encoded in 2.6 KB with Graphene. We show in simulation that Graphene reduces traffic overhead by reducing block overhead.
Supported in part by an equipment grant from the Collaborative R&D Fund managed by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative.
Notes
- 1.
Actual implementations of Bloom filters and IBLTs involve several (non-continuous) ceiling functions such that we can re-write:
$$\begin{aligned} T(a) =&\left( \lceil \ln (\frac{m-n}{a})\rceil \left\lceil \frac{n\ln (\frac{m-n}{a})}{\lceil \ln (\frac{m-n}{a})\rceil \ln ^2(2)} \right\rceil \right) \frac{1}{8} + \lceil a\rceil \tau . \end{aligned}$$(2)The optimal value of Eq. 2 can be found with a simple brute force loop. We compared the value of a picked by using \(a=n/(c\tau )\) to the cost for that a from Eq. 2, for valid combinations of \(50\le n \le 2000\) and \(50\le m \le 10000\). We found that it is always within 37% of the cost of the optimal value from Eq. 2, with a median difference of 16%. In practice, a for-loop brute-force search for the lowest value of a is almost no cost to perform, and we do so in our simulations.
References
Andresen, G.: O(1) block propagation, August 2014. https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2
Bloom, B.H.: Space/time trade-offs in hash coding with allowable errors. Commun. ACM 13(7), 422–426 (1970)
Corallo, M.: Bip152: compact block relay, April 2016. https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0152.mediawiki
Eppstein, D., Goodrich, M.T., Uyeda, F., Varghese, G.: What’s the difference?: efficient set reconciliation without prior context. In: ACM SIGCOMM (2011)
Ethereum Homestead Documentation. http://ethdocs.org/en/latest/
Goodrich, M., Mitzenmacher, M.: Invertible bloom lookup tables. In: Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, pp. 792–799, September 2011
Hanke, T.: A Speedup for Bitcoin mining (Rev. 5), 31 March 2016. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00575.pdf
Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, May 2009
Russel, R.: Playing with invertible bloom lookup tables and Bitcoin transactions, November 2014. http://rustyrussell.github.io/pettycoin/2014/11/05/Playing-with-invertible-bloom-lookup-tables-and-bitcoin-transactions.html
Sasson, E.B., Chiesa, A., Garman, C., Green, M., Miers, I., Tromer, E., Virza, M.: Zerocash: decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin. In: IEEE S&P. pp. 459–474 (2014)
Tschipper, P.: BUIP010 Xtreme Thinblocks, January 2016. https://bitco.in/forum/threads/buip. 010-passed-xtreme-thinblocks.774/
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Pinar Ozisik, A., Andresen, G., Bissias, G., Houmansadr, A., Levine, B. (2017). Graphene: A New Protocol for Block Propagation Using Set Reconciliation. In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., Navarro-Arribas, G., Hartenstein, H., Herrera-Joancomartí, J. (eds) Data Privacy Management, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology. DPM CBT 2017 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10436. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67816-0_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67816-0_24
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-67815-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-67816-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)