Author: Caleb James DeLisle 2013-04-09 14:39:49
Published on: 2013-04-09T14:39:49+00:00
Mike Hearn suggests that the root problem with Bitcoin is that people believe the blockchain will always be a free, uncensorable, and permanent data structure. However, this is unlikely to be true in the long run due to legal issues and the need to host blocks forever. Legal issues are unlikely to arise as tools need to extract illegal content from the blockchain. The need to host blocks forever can be resolved by providing incentives for people not to prune. One way to do this is to charge for access to older parts of the chain, but serving large static datasets is not that expensive. Additionally, nodes can serve up blocks encrypted under a random key, which can discourage the stuffing of abusive content into the blockchain. Overall, Mike Hearn suggests an approach to keep the block header and an array of bitfields representing each transaction's spent and unspent outputs to make it workable in the long term.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T14:44:21.845645+00:00