Hi, I've recently been kicking around the idea of being able to download blocks in chunks after verifying the header and choosing the longest chain.

It seems to me that it should be possible to download the block in chunks of e.g. 512 transactions, and then provide a proof that that is a valid chunk via the merkle root. This would allow blocks to be streamed out across the network without having to wait for the entire block to be uploaded and validated first.

If I'm correct that this could work, the merkle root collision (CVE-2012-2459) is a bit of a nuisance to deal with. Has there been any talk of addressing that bug when we eventually hard fork to allow for a larger block size? I think using a hash of 0 on the right side of the pairing would work, as opposed to duplicating the current hash to get a pair.