Addressing Nano's weaknesses (bandwidth usage and disk IO). Nano voting traffic to be reduced by 99.9% by implementing vote by hash, lazy bootstrapping, and reduced vote rebroadcasting (x-post r/CryptoTechnology)

Voting traffic currently dominates the Nano network (vs actual transactions), because of the size of the votes, the number of times nodes vote, and the number of nodes those votes get rebroadcasted to. This reduces node throughput, makes it harder for low-end nodes to survive increases in transaction traffic, and reduces overall network scalability.The Nano devs are now implementing a number of interesting solutions that should drastically reduce the voting bandwidth (99.9%) and required disk IO of the Nano protocol, which are the network's two biggest bottlenecks.Vote by hash - Initial reduction from 40 kilobytes of voting traffic per block to 600 bytes per block (98.5% reduction) by not including the full block in each vote and only using the block's hash.Lazy bootstrapping - Right now a block may get voted on thousands of times during it’s lifetime by nodes that don’t actually care about the block or chain it’s on — AND they’ll vote on other blocks which reference that block indirectly, leading to thousands of unnecessary votes. Passively listening for blocks and only pulling down chains that a node cares about solves this, and drastically reduces overall voting traffic.Vote stapling - Votes by reps are signed and distributed with blocks, so that when a node gets a new block that has already been voted on, it will no longer request voting confirmation once more from the representatives. The votes will be sent in a bundle with minimal vote traffic.Vote rebroadcasting - Since v13, the redundancy of nodes voting 4 times on each block (which in turn are rebroadcast) is no longer needed. This is because nodes now automatically seek them out if they're missing. This leads to lower votes, fewer relays, and will decrease network traffic by 75%.TL;DR:Nano is about to get a lot more scalable (99.9% less voting traffic). Stress tests will follow.Sources:https://np.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/910kyk/nano_network_status_update/https://youtu.be/i5d7ZZZ99b8https://medium.com/nanocurrency/developer-update-7-23-2018-e7941346bd0f

Submitted July 28, 2018 at 10:08PM