Block propagation refers to the process of transmitting information about newly created blocks across a network of computers. When a new block is added to a blockchain, it needs to be quickly shared with all the other participants to maintain the consistency and security of the network.
Block propagation ensures that every computer in the network receives the updated block information in a timely manner, allowing all participants to stay synchronized and maintain a consistent blockchain.
Full definition
The release of SegWit would dovetail into other aspects of bitcoin development, including a proposal by contributor Matt Corallo to reduce network
block propagation times.
Technology This week at the Scaling Bitcoin Conference 2017, at Stanford University in California, bitcoin proponents heard about a
new block propagation technology that claims to be 10X more efficient than compact blocks.
The bitcoin community is excited about a new technology called Graphene, a new
block propagation technology that utilizes set reconciliation.
During his presentation at Scaling Bitcoin Montreal, Todd explained how
lousy block propagation becomes more problematic when the Great Firewall of China is factored into the equation.
Two megabytes was picked based on data collected by Toomim, who forked the Bitcoin testnet earlier this year to test
global block propagation with large blocks.
In this case, the developers presented data on the rate at which transactions can be accepted into bitcoin's mempool, in this way evolving their past work
on block propagation, or how the network might pass larger blocks between peers.
Due to the combination of both of these methods, Graphene doesn't send a list of transaction IDs, but carries a small bloom filter and IBLT at 1/10 of
current block propagation protocols used today.
These include technical projects to improve the Bitcoin Core software and the Bitcoin protocol in various ways, such as increased privacy features,
faster block propagation methods and overall research.
During the last couple of months, the Ethereum test network was pushed to its limits in order to test scalability and
block propagation times.
After talking about decentralization, we got into Soumya's research focus — cryptocurrency networking and
block propagation.