with a fanout of 2 and 6000 nodes, wouldnt it be 10 to 12 hops on average? assuming average ping time of 300 millis, plus latency of ?, I guess it is ~5 seconds. pretty good.
If a bit of privacy is sacrificed and it is started with sending to 16 peers, I think that would reduce things by 3 hops or so. probably not worth doing. But it would dramatically reduce the chances of a propagation "fizzling" out. That could be avoided by retransmitting to a pair of two other peers if the tx is not seen in the network after 15 seconds
James
Hmm, yeah. Well connected nodes or nodes close to or actually the originating node could make more connections.
I'm put in mind of a neural structure where connections are well used get stronger. If node B always has the transaction when I try and send it to it, maybe I back off and allow it to try to send me transactions first.