📅 Original date posted:2017-01-03
📝 Original message:I believe the filter can be more compact than this, but even if not an
order of magnitude saving of disk space is still significant.
On 2016-05-11 13:29, Bob McElrath wrote:
> Eerrrr....let me revise that last paragraph. That's 12 *GB* of filters
> at
> today's block height (at fixed false-positive rate 1e-6. Compared to
> block
> headers only which are about 33 MB today. So this proposal is not
> really
> compatible with such a wallet being "light"...
>
> Damn units...
>
> Bob McElrath via bitcoin-dev [bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org]
> wrote:
>> I like this idea, but let's run some numbers...
>>
>> bfd--- via bitcoin-dev [bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org] wrote:
>> > A Bloom Filter Digest is deterministically created of every block
>>
>> Bloom filters completely obfuscate the required size of the filter for
>> a desired
>> false-positive rate. But, an optimal filter is linear in the number
>> of elements
>> it contains for fixed false-positive rate, and logarithmic in the
>> false-positive
>> rate. (This comment applies to a RLL encoded Bloom filter Greg
>> mentioned, but
>> that's not the only way) That is for N elements and false positive
>> rate
>> \epsilon:
>>
>> filter size = - N \log_2 \epsilon
>>
>> Given that the data that would be put into this particular filter is
>> *already*
>> hashed, it makes more sense and is faster to use a Cuckoo[1] filter,
>> choosing a
>> fixed false-positive rate, given expected wallet sizes. For Bloom
>> filters,
>> multiply the above formula by 1.44.
>>
>> To prevent light clients from downloading more blocks than necessary,
>> the
>> false-positive rate should be roughly less than 1/(block height). If
>> we take
>> the false positive rate to be 1e-6 for today's block height ~ 410000,
>> this is
>> about 20 bits per element. So for todays block's, this is a 30kb
>> filter, for a
>> 3% increase in block size, if blocks commit to the filter. Thus the
>> required
>> size of the filter commitment is roughly:
>>
>> filter size = N \log_2 H
>>
>> where H is the block height. If bitcoin had these filters from the
>> beginning, a
>> light client today would have to download about 12MB of data in
>> filters. My
>> personal SPV wallet is using 31MB currently. It's not clear this is a
>> bandwidth
>> win, though it's definitely a win for computing load on full nodes.
>>
>>
>> [1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/papers/cuckoo-conext2014.pdf
>>
>> --
>> Cheers, Bob McElrath
>>
>> "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat,
>> and wrong."
>> -- H. L. Mencken
>>
>>
>>
>> !DSPAM:5733934b206851108912031!
>
>
>
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>
> --
> Cheers, Bob McElrath
>
> "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat,
> and wrong."
> -- H. L. Mencken