Over the past few months, there has been a lot of talk about ways to make bitcoin better. Scalability is a pressing matter, although there is no proper solution in sight yet. A new proposal that alters the verification of network blocks could make Bitcoin more efficient. Under the Cuckoo Cache banner, making Bitcoin more efficient may be a lot easier than people anticipated at first.
Cuckoo Cache Sounds Quite Intriguing
The way bitcoin blocks are processed right now is rather inefficient, according to Bitcoin developer Jeremy Rubin. The current code base forces bitcoin nodes to go through every individual transaction in a block to make sure none of them were validated before. A rather strange concept, considering there is an additional verification of all bitcoin transactions before they are formed into a block. Merging both verification procedures into one could end up saving a lot of time and energy.
Adding a “cache” to the bitcoin source code will make things far more efficient. Such a cache would allow the bitcoin code to look for all parameters required to verify transaction blocks. Rather than performing two verifications to achieve the same goal, streamlining this whole process makes a lot more sense. It is not surprising the Bitcoin Core developers have taken a liking to this idea, as it will be integrated into the upcoming 0.14 client.
Even though bitcoin is more than eight years old already, some of the existing code base is well due for an upgrade. Using standard C++ data structure made a lot of sense years ago, but it becomes somewhat of a problem as bitcoin evolves. Storing and processing all of the relevant data needs to be fine tuned, and Cuckoo Cache is one option is going about things.
What is of particular interest is how the optimization of bitcoin data structures does not require a lot of coding expertise. Anyone can contribute to bitcoin by trying to make things more efficient. Moreover, there are a lot of active developers who are more than happy to help you out or make suggestions as you work towards an efficient solution. Working on problems allows aspiring coders to gain a better understanding of bitcoin as a whole, that much is certain.
It will be interesting to see how the integration of Cuckoo Cache affects the scalability of bitcoin moving forward. It is evident some solutions have to be created while the community continues to debate of they prefer SegWit or Bitcoin Unlimited. For now, it appears this latter project will not be integrating Cuckoo Cache, although that situation may change over the coming months.
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