Author: Brian Hoffman 2014-04-10 17:06:22
Published on: 2014-04-10T17:06:22+00:00
The email conversation starts with the sender expressing gratitude towards a community, which doesn't kickban newcomers, and takes time to explain concepts. He promises not to waste the recipient's time in the next 30 days. The recipient then responds to a suggestion regarding disk space savings. He explains that the state of the blockchain is the UTXO set, which is the set of all unspent transaction outputs at the currently active point in the block chain. However, one cannot just give someone the UTXO set and expect them to trust it as there is no way to prove that it was the result of processing the actual blocks. Bitcoin uses a "zero trust" model where it never assumes any data received from the outside is valid, so it has to see the previous blocks in order to establish the validity of the current UTXO set. This is what initial block syncing does. A related evolution is merkle UTXO commitments, which means that we shape the UTXO set as a merkle tree, compute its root after every block, and require that the block commits to this root hash (by putting it in the coinbase for example). Combining both ideas means you get "superblocks", in a way that is less than currently but perhaps still acceptably validated.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T19:34:40.970168+00:00