Minisketch is a new solution that’s trying to solve an old problem.
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Spearheaded by Blockstream co-founder Pieter Wuille, Bitcoin Core contributor and fellow Blockstream co-founder Gregory Maxwell, and Blockstream software engineer Gleb Naumenko, the open-source initiative is designed to achieve set reconciliation between the mempools of each full node.
“Set reconciliation, in short, is the problem of trying to figure out what the differences are between two sets stored on different computers, while minimizing how much data needs to be exchanged between them. In particular, it’s trying to do so while sending less data than the entire set of data,” Wuille told Bitcoin Magazine
For Bitcoin, this means discerning the differences in transaction data between nodes. Maxwell likened set reconciliation to the process of syncing your phone’s contact list with another person who has many of the same contacts.
“You could send them your whole list but it won’t fit on a postcard and would be pretty wasteful in any case, since they already know most of the contacts … It is possible, in fact, to communicate your whole set of contacts to them by sending only as much information as the size of the difference between your lists even without any idea in advance of what the actual differences are,” Maxwell told Bitcoin Magazine.
In short, set reconciliation would reduce the bandwidth required to run a full node on the Bitcoin network by minimizing how much data each node transmits to each other. This would effectively allow nodes to sync up the data in their mempools more efficiently.
Breaking Down Set Reconciliation
The problem that minisketch wants to amend isn’t blockchain specific.
Set reconciliation is a constant frustration that any distributed system grapples with. Writ large, it simply means that two or more
