search

ethereum / go-ethereum

Go implementation of the Ethereum protocol
https://geth.ethereum.org
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
47.53k stars 20.13k forks source link

Proposal: download the entire blockchain over bittorrent #14551

Closed Glamdring closed 4 years ago

Glamdring commented 7 years ago

Hello,

This is an improvement proposal, rather than a bug report. And I'm not a big Ethereum expert, so it might not be a great idea, but...

Currently I see a great usability issue in the fact that the blockchain is downloaded (synced) very slowly. For me it crashed a couple of times, which which in no way is helping adoption among not so technical users.

So why not push snapshots of the blockchain to a bittorrent DHT? People have done that with the Bitcoin blockchain - a snapshot is available for download from various places.

But manual download isn't ideal - my proposal is to include a small bittorrent client in geth (and other implementations), so that peers can use the ethereum protocol to push a particular snapshot to the DHT, and also "advertise" the same DHT key to newly joined peers.

I'm not sure if that can be secure enough, e.g. if malicious nodes won't have able to interfere and some clients end up with a fake blockchain, but I guess that can be remedied when the next block is received and it doesn't match.

I know I'm a bit vague, but that's the general idea - have a bittorrent client in the ethereum client that pushes and downloads a blockchain snapshot (e.g. each day / week) to a bittorrent DHT.

fjl commented 7 years ago

One issue is that the blockchain changes all the time. New data is constantly created and would need to be pushed to the bittorrent network.

Glamdring commented 7 years ago

Yup, that's what I meant - "pushes and downloads a blockchain snapshot (e.g. each day / week)". The thing is, data itself is not pushed to the bittorrent network - only the hash of the data, which is a way to locate the actual data on the clients' machines, where it resides anyway

kdunn926 commented 7 years ago

+1 to this idea - the blockchain sync process is quite slow at the moment and will likely create an artificial barrier to entry for other new users.

JigarJoshi commented 7 years ago

maps back to SNAPSHOT and release model of software development. I like the idea. decentralized repository of releases and a scrolling SNAPSHOT. 👍

zxsanny commented 7 years ago

Can somebody share Ethereum geth\chaindata directory via https://www.resilio.com/individuals/# and share read-only key for that?

nicksavers commented 7 years ago

The slow sync process is probably not because of a slow download, but mostly because all blocks are fully processed to calculate and verify the state.

Blocks in a chain don't really change after a valid hash is found, so if a DHT-like network is actually faster, miners could upload the block to Swarm and clients could download the data from there after receiving the block-hashes.

mpcm commented 6 years ago

So... I ended up here, because I assumed this (or something like it) was already being done.. either within or alongside geth. Then I recently setup a new system, and was surprised about the initial time to download (and cpu burn of that effort).

stale[bot] commented 4 years ago

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.