Author: Gregory Maxwell 2013-12-20 19:48:23
Published on: 2013-12-20T19:48:23+00:00
On December 19, 2013, Mark Friedenbach shared a first draft of a BIP for a new Merkle-compressed data structure with fellow bitcoin developers. The need for this data structure arose out of the misnamed "Ultimate blockchain compression" project but it has since been recognized to have many other applications. Early comments were made regarding the nature of VARCHAR(), whether the 'middle' is the best place for extradata and if some applications might use midstate compression. The performance of raw compression function would hardly ever be a performance consideration unless using a slow interpreted language. CPU performance should not be a major consideration in this BIP. However, the cost of validating the structure under a zero-knowledge proof should be considered. Prefix tree compressed applications break compact update proofs and add complexity to the BIP. They could only be used for data where all verifying nodes had all their data under the tree.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T17:57:12.490982+00:00