Bitcoin does this either with `getblocks` (returns up to 500 following block
hashes) or `getheaders` (returns up to 2000 following block headers, not
just hashes). However, Bitcoin headers are much smaller than Zcash
headers, which contain a giant Equihash solution block, and many Zcash
blocks don't have many transactions in them, so the block header is
often similarly sized to the block itself. Because we're
aiming to have a highly parallel network layer, it seems better to use
`getblocks` to implement `FindBlocks` (which is necessarily sequential)
and parallelize the processing of the block downloads.
PushPeers is more complicated to thread into the rest of our
architecture (we would need to establish a data path connecting our
service handling inbound requests to the network layer's auto-crawler),
and since we crawl the network automatically anyways, we don't actually
need to accept them in order to get updated address information.
The only possible problem with this approach is that zcashd refuses to
answer multiple address requests from the same connection, ostensibly
for fingerprinting prevention (although it's totally happy to give
exactly the same information, as long as you hang up and reconnect
first, lol). It's unclear how this will interact with our design -- on
the one hand, it could mean that we don't get new addr information when
we ask, but on the other hand, we may have enough churn in our
connection pool that this isn't a problem anyways.
Attempting to implement requests for block data revealed a problem with
the previous connection logic. Block data is requested by sending a
`getdata` message with hashes of the requested blocks; the peer responds
with a sequence of `block` messages with the blocks themselves.
However, this wasn't possible to handle with the previous connection
logic, which could only convert a single Bitcoin message into a
Response. Instead, we factor out the message handling logic into a
Handler, which can statefully accumulate arbitrary data into a Response
and signal completion. This is still pretty ugly but it does work.
As a side effect, the HeartbeatNonceMismatch error is removed; because
the Handler now tries to process messages until it comes to a Response,
it just ignores mismatched nonces (and will eventually time out).
The previous Mempool and Transaction requests were removed but could be
re-added in a different form later. Also, the `Get` prefixes are
removed from `Request` to tidy the name.
Henry de Valence
Jane Lusby
Jane Lusby