Bengaluru BITDEVS x localhost research: Stale Blocks
It looks like bad luck, and that's how most people treat it: a rare, wasteful accident not worth thinking about. But a discarded block is also a signal. How often it happens tells you how healthy Bitcoin's underlying network really is, how quickly blocks are reaching everyone, and where things are getting stuck.
We mostly ignore that signal but Ram thinks we shouldn't.
He's working on STALETIP, a new network message that would let nodes actually measure how often stale blocks happen, right at the P2P layer.
It's early, open work, built alongside Anthony Towns (one of the most senior Bitcoin Core contributors) and w0xlt, which makes it a good proposal to think through together rather than just hear about.
In this session Ram will explain stale blocks from the ground up, why they matter for network health, and how his proposal aims to surface them.
Also on the table: leaving Big Tech for Bitcoin
Ram left a career in Big Tech a few months ago to work on Bitcoin full time, and now contributes to Bitcoin open source, including the new Bitcoin Core GUI. So we've also kept some time at the end for the other question worth asking: what makes someone walk away from big tech to work on bitcoin open source.
Is it your first time coming to Bitspace for a session? Wondering what to expect?
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