Dino: A Block Transmission Protocol with Low Bandwidth Consumption and Propagation Latency

Block capacity plays a critical role in maintaining blockchain security and improving transactions per second (TPS). Increasing block capacity can help attain higher TPS, but it also prolongs block propagation latency and degrades system security. In the present paper, we argue that existing work compressing the block size to shorten block propagation latency introduces an undesired side effect, which is that the size of compressed blocks will increase with transaction volume. Instead, we propose Dino, a new block transmission protocol between two peers. Once a node receives a Dino block, it can recover the original block with that Dino block and transactions in its transaction pool. Since Dino transmits block construction rules instead of compressed block content, it has good scalability to transmit blocks with larger transaction volume. We deploy Dino into Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash to compare it with the state-of-art protocols: Compact, XThin, and Graphene. For a block with 3,000 transactions, its corresponding Dino block is no more than 1 KB in size, which is only 4% of a XThin block, 5% of a Compact block, and 20% of a Graphene block. The size of Dino blocks stays constant when the transaction volume reaches Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash’s protocol limit. Simulation experiments show that Dino scales well with higher transaction generation rates and can reduce block propagation latency.