Bitcoin Core Merged BIP-324 and AssumeUTXO Proposals

BIP-324

• BIP-324 introduces a new Bitcoin P2P transport protocol, which features opportunistic encryption, a mild bandwidth reduction, and the ability to negotiate upgrades before exchanging application messages.
• "Since all data relayed in the Bitcoin P2P network is inherently public, and the protocol lacks a notion of cryptographic identities, peers talk to each other over unencrypted and unauthenticated connections. Nevertheless, this plaintext nature of the current P2P protocol (referred to as v1 in this document) has severe drawbacks in the presence of attackers."

"This proposal for a new P2P protocol version (v2) aims to improve upon this by raising the costs for performing these attacks substantially, primarily through the use of unauthenticated, opportunistic transport encryption. In addition, the bytestream on the wire is made pseudorandom (i.e., indistinguishable from uniformly random bytes) to a passive eavesdropper."

AssumeUTXO

• AssumeUXTO usesuses serialized UTXO sets to substantially reduce the amount of time needed to bootstrap a usable Bitcoin node with acceptable changes in security.

"The implementation James O'Beirne put together has implemented all the logic for importing and starting to use a UTXO snapshot, as well as tools to create one in the first place. Very much like assumevalid, assumeutxo will simply accept an existing snapshot file as an argument and load that into the user's node and start running from there. This will add a massive amount of flexibility to node operators, both on the end user side as well as businesses," explained Shinobi in an article for Bitcoin Magazine.

• "Users can create a snapshot of their current UTXO set and store that somewhere; if their node ever crashes or any of the databases corrupt, they can simply grab that UTXO snapshot and restart their node from that blockheight instead of having to restart from the Genesis block," he added.

BIP-324 / Merged
AssumeUTXO / Merged