More than 10 years living in the world of Bitcoin has shown us that there is a long road ahead for Bitcoin developers, and BIP 324, created in March 2019, could be the next important step on that road.
The BIP was authored by Switzerland-based Bitcoin developer and cofounder of Shift Cryptosecurity[1] Jonas Schnelli to help address a perceived concern around the messages exchanged between Bitcoin peers.
“Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” is the title of the Bitcoin white paper and, as it suggests, the P2P layer is a major component of the Bitcoin network but also the one with significant inefficiencies and existing theoretical attack vectors. One of the major fields for potential research and upgrades to Bitcoin is in this P2P network and some of the recent prominent development in this sphere has sparked a lot of attention, including proposals like Dandelion[2] (BIP 156) and Erlay[3].
So what is the P2P network architecture? Before Bitcoin, the most successful implementation of a P2P network was seen in the application for file-sharing services: originally Napster (with partial centralization by central server catalog) and, later on, BitTorrent.
In the ideal configuration, P2P networks shouldn’t have any hierarchy (all nodes are equal), and nodes should share the network load uniformly. This basic layer of a mesh of interconnected nodes is what helps Bitcoin to be censorship-resistant. As with torrent networks, governments have taken actions to block them[4] on the search-engine level. One can only block the torrent search engines, but it’s much harder — close to impossible — to kill the P2P torrent network. The main question for these networks is: How private is it to use them?
Problems With the P2P Layer of Bitcoin
One of the problems
