https://youtu.be/999q3_htKPU?t=8m58s
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https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs
The backstory to decentralised web of nodes proposition (or most things) - which makes sense of what he is proposing and why it will work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa4pckodM9g
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With nodes: more decentralized nodes, the faster the download speeds.
With http: the more the users, the slower the download speeds.
Simples,
http://academictorrents.com/
Well, I wouldn't say that download speed is irrelevant, but the bottleneck of synching a full node is definitely the CPU.
Also, if I am not mistaken (I am not sure how Core does it), a full node will always download a single block, then validate it, then ask and wait for the next block to download, validate again etc...
A very serial process.
While the CPU is validating, the program isn't allowed to download the next block, for obvious reasons: if the last block is false, all following blocks are also false (wrong fork).
But not being allowed to download further blocks is what makes synching even slower.
(And vice versa, while the next block is still downloading, the CPU can't validate yet. All those waiting times add to a large delay, especially when you consider hundreds of thousands of blocks.)
So is this the best way of doing things?
The goal is to have better initial synching speed. It concerns people who download a blockchain from scratch, or need to sync weeks or months of data.
It can be argued that syncing could be much faster by downloading a large chunk of the longest available blockchain once (servicenodes will help out), and then do the initial validation process in one sweep,
and if there are errors, go back to serial processing as it is done now--> validate and download the rest of the blockchain from the last validated index, block by block.
Serial processing is necessary once your wallet is up-to-date (or near up-to-date), and you just need to keep track of the best blockchain available on a per-minute basis.
But is it necessary for the initial sync process, that is the question....