Author: Ethan Scruples 2019-04-03 15:39:29
Published on: 2019-04-03T15:39:29+00:00
The proposal for mandatory UTXO commitments soft forked into Bitcoin could result in a non-growing IBD that grows over time. The security price for this benefit is little to none. A scenario where there is an invalid block at current height - 50,001 is highly unlikely to happen as miners are not going to stack 50,000 blocks on top of an invalid block without the economic majority abandoning the invalid chain. If this situation does occur, Bob may discover it too late to matter or may find that mischievous entities have enough time to mine equally weighted alternative histories from the Genesis block forward to the invalid block. Assumeutxo is a proposal for a complementary alternative to SPV modes that allows nodes to initialize using a serialized version of the UTXO set rendered by another node at some predetermined height. This way, a node can quickly reconstruct its chainstate based upon the snapshot and compares a hash of the resulting UTXO set to a preordained hash hard-coded in the software like assumevalid. Snapshots could be obtained from multiple separate peers in the same manner as block download. This method has exciting use-cases, such as mobile devices functioning as fully validating nodes with access to the complete UTXO set. However, there are security implications to consider, and it is recommended that if we implement assumeutxo, we do not allow its specification via command-line argument.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T18:01:35.329088+00:00