FluffyNet Experiment is Now Over
Some time ago, the Monero team launched a subnet to test compact blocks. This was known as "FluffyNet" and the experiment is now closed.
In short, this was for bandwidth reduction for Monero network.
Its compact blocks. Basically, in all cryptocurrency networks, the transactions are broadcast and relayed. Then, when a block gets solved, the block gets relayed with all the transactions - even though all of the nodes probably have all of the transactions because they were relayed throughout the network
So what fluffyblocks does is transmit a fluffyblock - basically, a block with an index of which transactions should be in it. When a fblock arrives at a node, the node sees if it has everything from the index, and then adds it to rebuild the block. Its like an fblock is an instruction set. If the node doesn't have all of the transactions, it asks its peers for transactions.
This ultimately results in a decrease in bandwidth used by nodes... almost a cut by half. And in Monero, this is great because our transactions, and therefore blocks, are gonna get huuuuuge
https://moneroworld.com/ftest.html
The announcement of the end of the experiment was made yesterday as there was another announcement made for the release of the Helium Hydra hard fork that had major improvements and bug fixes that included compact blocks.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/6yryyp/the_great_fluffynet_experiment_1_comes_to_a_close/
You can read a post I did on the HF update here:
The compact blocks are off by default since it does need more testing but you can launch the new feature with the daemon launch flag mentioned in the above screenshot.
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