From: "Edil Guimarães de Medeiros" <jose.edil@gmail.com>
Cc: Bitcoin Development Mailing List <bitcoindev@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] [BIP Proposal] Stale Tip Relay
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2026 10:51:16 -0300 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CANJiN3+KetUeNjjeRgd7xgCSF+vAakDtH7ysPC+h4DqtHJPsLA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <d92f1615-368b-4406-b326-a1799c72a555n@googlegroups.com>
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There's an ongoing effort to document mainnet stale blocks:
https://github.com/bitcoin-data/stale-blocks
As one can imagine, since there is currently no way to recover them from
the network itself, this
requires constantly monitoring several long running nodes in the hope to
get them. From a monitoring
and research perspective, this proposal could be useful.
But I'm not so sure about how that improves the main purpose of the
network. Quite the contrary, seems
to open more DoS and fingerprinting vectors.
About the design, it's not clear to me how that could work in face of more
than one competing chain. For
instance, suppose I have:
/- C4
A1 - A2 - A3 - A4
\- B3 - B4
It's not clear to me how the proposal deals with communicating this, which
is quite common in signet and
the testnets, since each message is designed to relay a single competing
branch (e.g. B3-B4 above).
Left more detailed and editorial comments in the bip repository PR.
Cheers.
Edil
Em qua., 29 de jul. de 2026 às 14:28, Ram <pseudoramdom8@gmail.com>
escreveu:
> Hello list,
>
> This proposal introduces `staletip`, an opt-in P2P message for relaying
> recent
> stale tips between peers. Building on AJ Towns' initial work, w0xlt and I
> have
> developed the proposal further and built a proof-of-concept implementation.
>
> Draft BIP:
>
> https://github.com/pseudoramdom/bips/blob/staletip-bip-draft/bip-staletip.md
>
> Proof-of-concept:
> https://github.com/w0xlt/bitcoin/tree/staletip-v4
>
> Today, once a block loses a race and goes stale, it stops propagating –
> compact
> block relay and FIBRE aggressively relay the winning chain, while stale
> branches fall away. That's great for fast propagation, but it makes the
> stale
> rate difficult to observe. Even dedicated monitors [0] have only partial
> views:
> a stale block seen by one monitor may never reach another.
>
> The stale rate is a useful network-health signal because it is closely
> related
> to block propagation delay. The longer it takes miners to learn about a
> newly
> found block, the greater the chance that another valid block will be found
> at
> the same height, creating a race in which one of the blocks becomes stale
> [1].
> An elevated stale rate could also expose validation or relay bottlenecks.
> For example, the May 2023 "inv-to-send" bug degraded block propagation and
> coincided with a roughly 10x increase in the observed stale rate [2].
>
> A stale block does not by itself identify its cause, but changes in the
> rate or shape of stale branches can provide a reason to investigate:
>
> - a network partition – when a partition heals, blocks mined on the
> losing side become stale, potentially producing several related stale
> blocks at once.
> - adversarial mining strategies such as selfish mining [3] – these
> can cause honest miners' blocks to become stale.
>
> The proposal fills this observability gap with an opt-in P2P message called
> `staletip`, allowing nodes to proactively announce recent stale tips to
> peers.
>
> An added benefit is potentially faster reorg handling: if a node already
> knows
> the relevant headers, and perhaps has the block data, it has less work to
> do if
> that branch later becomes active.
>
> At protocol level, nodes advertise support using BIP 434 `feature` message
> [4],
> and `staletip` messages are only sent to peers that advertised support.
> Each
> announcement contains the fork point, a sequence of compressed headers,
> and a
> flag indicating whether the sender can serve the stale tip block.
>
> The proposed default relay policy:
> - relays only tips within 1000 blocks (about seven days) of the active
> tip,
> keeping announcements recent and stale-tip spam costly on mainnet.
> - limits branches to 20 compressed headers, covering short-term reorgs
> without tracking persistent chain splits and keeps each announcement
> under
> 1 kB.
> - keeps at most 10 recent tips in the relay cache, so announcing the full
> cache to a new peer remains under 10 kB, excluding any blocks
> requested.
>
> The BIP text has more background and the full message format. Comments are
> welcome.
>
> Cheers,
> Ram (pseudoramdom <https://github.com/pseudoramdom>)
> &
> w0xlt <https://github.com/w0xlt>
>
> [0] https://github.com/bitcoin-data/stale-blocks
> [1]
> https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/propagation-delay-and-mining-centralization-modeling-stale-rates/2110
> [2] https://b10c.me/observations/15-inv-to-send-queue/
> [3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243
> [4] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0434.md
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2026-08-11 14:04 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 3+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2026-07-29 17:21 [bitcoindev] [BIP Proposal] Stale Tip Relay Ram
2026-08-11 13:51 ` Edil Guimarães de Medeiros [this message]
2026-08-13 18:53 ` Ram
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