Block propagation consistency restored

Just wanted to point out that more than 95% of blocks are now coming through with zero round trips on a node, which is pretty cool (it was 97.2% just yesterday, to be exact). This is back to how things used to be with compact blocks, which is great. The reason this matters is that any round trip basically doubles or even more the time needed to get a block out there, and any delays benefit the bigger miners at the expense of the smaller ones. A while back, this number dropped below 40% because the big miners were doing their own thing, not sticking to the usual node settings. But now those defaults have been updated to reflect what's actually happening, so block propagation is back on track. Oh, and just a heads up: any complaints about wanting to censor transactions and mess with the network will be off-topic here and will be deleted.

Nice job I assume this issue happened due to the 0.1 to 0.9 sat fees? So are all nodes now taking 0.1 sats as the bottom number

And presumably the other standardness limits that were changed (e.g. data carrier) but primarily fees. Not all nodes by any means, but enough that blocks are propagating well among most of those that do.  It doesn't take all of them, but just enough to form a short connected graph among those that do, and blocks will selectively ride the fastest paths around the network and route around nodes that propagate slowly because they blocked transactions that got included.

Interesting observathions. Are these observations based solely on internal metrics and it would be helpful if you could specify which ones from your own nodes, or is there general statistics available that apply to all active nodes?I’ve only been able to find relevant data gathered from 10 nodesfor 2024 , and nothing for 2025/2026.

You have more recent stats in the same topic: https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/stats-on-compact-block-reconstructions/1052/44

It's interesting to know that this recovery happened without all nodes needing to align, just enough of the well-connected graph behaving efficiently. This really reinforces how fragile propagation can be when miners drift from sane defaults. The fact that it dipped below 40% not long ago I think is a reminder that policy changes can quietly hurt decentralization before anyone notices.

My figures are just from watching a couple nodes, though I expect similar figures on most nodes running current software, it's possible for some to be lower if they're surrounded by peers with more restrictive policy.