Quote from: mda on November 09, 2017, 01:49:36 AM

Is anybody working on this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1533714.0 ?
A compression ratio of 50% equals 3.5 years of traffic growth at 23% CAGR https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/vni-hyperconnectivity-wp.html .

Most of the data in Bitcoin blocks and mempool transactions is incompressible, while some of it is trivially compressible (certain format fields, etc.) I am guessing that the Core devs would be interested in more aggressive compression using Merkle hashes. Since it is basically the case that the entire blockchain is an immutable, read-only structure (except just when a new block arrives), the only time you need to transmit raw data is for new transactions and the latest block. I doubt that the bandwidth for these is a bottleneck, so that 25% is probably not worth the cost of optimization. For other kinds of synchronization between nodes, all you need to transmit are the hashes.