Author: Eric Lombrozo 2011-12-17 07:41:56
Published on: 2011-12-17T07:41:56+00:00
Eric Lombrozo, a cryptocurrency developer who has been working on the development of cryptocurrency-related software for several months, believes that the potential for the bitcoin protocol is not being fully exploited. Despite having 12 bytes for a command code and eight bytes for a services type, the current protocol specification only lists 16 commands and one service type. Lombrozo believes that there is an urgent need for breaking up all the different tasks into separate components that can run as independent services on different types of devices.One of the issues Lombrozo is dealing with now pertains to block chain storage. As of right now, it is implemented as sequential disk files using Berkeley DB in the satoshi client. Lombrozo believes that the direction this really needs to move towards is some sort of distributed hash table and the database queries should be performed using the bitcoin protocol itself. He proposes an extension to the bitcoin protocol to provide methods for performing more sophisticated queries, such as "Give me an inventory of transactions involving this particular public key" or "Give me an inventory all transactions in the last n blocks with unredeemed outputs." This could be done by adding a few more commands.Furthermore, Lombrozo proposes a new network services type for nodes that serve as block chain/transaction pool storage. Any peer that wishes to verify the integrity of the block chain would still have to download all the block headers and all the blocks themselves and verify everything. But it would be very nice to be able to run thin services that can rely on other network peers to do this work. It is still possible to attain a high level of confidence in the integrity by querying multiple peers for similar objects and comparing. It is also possible to run your own dedicated block chain storage servers which you trust.Lombrozo believes that there are other ideas he has for other types of services, too. He throws his ideas out there and is interested in developing them further and helping put together some specs.
Updated on: 2023-06-05T00:46:21.216611+00:00