Author: Adam Tamir Shem-Tov 2017-08-27 04:09:08
Published on: 2017-08-27T04:09:08+00:00
A proposal has been made to solve the scalability issue faced by Bitcoin. Currently, Bitcoin's blockchain is 140GB in size and growing at a speed faster than Moore's Law. The proposed solution involves creating a pair of keys called the Genesis Pair, preserving the Genesis Block, combining all blocks up to the most recent one and cutting out intermediary transactions, downloading or creating the pruned block, and preserving a certain amount of the most recent blocks.The proposal suggests combining and pruning the blockchain every 999 blocks to create a maximum of 1000 blocks in the ledger. This would involve waiting for a special pruned block after every 999 blocks, which would prune everything from block 2 to block 1000, leaving only the genesis block. This pruned block would be verified by full nodes before the network accepts a new block.All relevant outputs needed to verify early transactions will be preserved in the pruning block, and the only information lost is of the intermediate transactions, not the final ones that have already been accepted by the community. The transaction chain would need to be rewritten to delete all intermediate transactions, showing as though transactions occurred from the Genesis block directly to the pruned block.While this pruning block could get extremely large in the future, it will not be the regular size of other blocks. If every account has only two transactions per day, the pruning block will grow to about 40GB in 30 years. The proposal aims to set storage growth at a reasonable number and ensure the blockchain has a maximum finite size.The blockchain has a theoretically infinite maximum size, which poses a problem for long-term storage. However, this issue can be addressed by creating a minimum transaction fee of 100 satoshis to ensure that the pruning block would not exceed 5PB in size, even in the most unlikely scenario. The pruning block can also be created gradually over time and named "Exodus Block." To rewrite the transaction and block chain, a special account called the Genesis Account can be created. This account's private and public key will be available to everyone, and it will be the source of all funds. The Genesis Account will only be used in the Exodus Block, which will show as though all the funds originated from and were sent with the Genesis private key.The number of Bitcoins keeps expanding, so the funds in the Genesis Account need to expand as well. This can be done by showing as though this account is the account which is mining the coins, and it will be the only account in the Exodus Block which “mines” the coins, and receives the mining bonus.If this proposal is not implemented, the blockchain may become too large for anyone to store, making us more dependent on private corporations to store it. By then, the corporations will have complete control of what happens next. It is urgent to acknowledge this problem and work towards a solution, which can be further developed by those with more technical understanding.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T03:28:37.044027+00:00