Author: Thomas Voegtlin 2014-04-09 16:09:06
Published on: 2014-04-09T16:09:06+00:00
On April 9th, 2014, Gregory Maxwell expressed his opinion on the requirements of Electrum, which he believed required more than a full node to function. He stated that electrum uses two large indexes, one being address to utxo (which is not going to grow larger than what Bitcoin already needs to store) and another being address to spent history (this one does threaten to become large). However, Electrum servers do not keep the full histories, they prune older entries. Without adapting Electrum clients, it would even be possible to keep only one bit per address (to know whether that address has been used or not), and that information is only used to restore wallets from seed. If the first index (patricia tree) was implemented in bitcoind, that would obviously be a big relief for Electrum servers. Furthermore, there was a discussion about supporting Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) clients in Bitcoin. Stratum already relies on bitcoind to provide its services, so it was suggested that it might be an easier way to support SPV clients than creating a new API in bitcoind for it. However, Bitcoin's own peer-to-peer protocol is already the API for an ordinary SPV client; therefore, no new API would be required except perhaps for some process management stuff (which also isn't provided for Electrum).
Updated on: 2023-06-08T19:14:20.263093+00:00