Slice

One of the processes reviewed in Bywise is full block validation before transmission to other nodes. This measure is extremely necessary because an attacker can perform spam, generating a huge amount of invalid blocks to congest the network.

During validation each node ends up holding the information for a while, generating a delay. This delay increases the block propagation time, allowing another valid block to appear and generate a fork in the network, even if it is temporary.

This phenomenon is called block collision and to minimize it it is necessary for the network to propagate a block very quickly. The shorter the window of time available for collision, the lower its probability.

To avoid spam, the block needs to be validated before being transmitted, but optimizations can be made. Bywise's strategy is to use the network's mempool to pre-process transactions.

Due to the use of the mempool, any cryptocurrency already knows the transactions long before they officially enter the blockchain. You can then validate all mempool transactions even before having a block ready. The block hash serves as an identifier and, if necessary, it can also verify any changes.

By storing only transaction hashes in the blocks and using sha-256, the block will be composed of 32-byte hashes. If each block has 10 MBs then we have a rate of 546.1 transactions per second.