Quote from: JasonWoods on January 07, 2018, 09:54:11 AM

The transactions have to be decoded anyway, so pushing them through a bunzip2 should not be that dramatic.

In exchange, you could reduce fees to about a third and increase transactions per block 3 times (more or less, one would have to test with a significant number of transactions to get the average compression rate).

With fees going through the roof and tx/s being rather low, I don't see why increasing the tx rate would be bad.

There must be some soft facts, that were not yet expressed, which prevents from doing so. Where would compression/decompression affect the ecosystem?

- a full node at the initial load of blockchain: verifies each tx - so the time get's increased
- during creation of new blocks: each miner has to decompress the tx, adding a bit of time
- a small block with only a few tx will not benefit much (but currently vast majority of blocks are filled with a substantiate amount of tx)
- it might be a hardfork (ugh), or vice versa, serious thoughts must be put into making it a soft fork
(approach/thought/idea: similiar to the way, segwit tx are forwarded to non-segwit nodes, same logic could apply to compressed tx)

+ with Moore's law: processing power is increasing faster than network bandwidth, so a good point for compression
+ compression during transfer on the network: decreases the amount of data to be transferred, reducing load, reducing latency, positive network effects
+ for the "end user": reduced tx size reduces fees, a quick bargain at current times (but against interests of miners?)
+ the bigger blocks get (with many tx), the better size reduction is achieved

there are way more...
I searched through the forum, if this wasn't discussed already. Nothing really found. Whenever such a topic is discussed, it quickly runs into overly complex discussion about possible implications in the future, which boils down into sovereignty over the interpretation of implications.

Only response to this would be a real "measurement": how much impact?
--> do a test setup and proof Cheesy