Author: Eric Voskuil 2017-12-18 21:58:58
Published on: 2017-12-18T21:58:58+00:00
The discussion on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list revolved around the question of how to know what consensus has formed around a UTXO set. Kalle Rosenbaum questioned the need for witnesses after a certain point, as once updates to the UTXO set are buried deep enough in the blockchain, they are no longer needed to authenticate the update. He suggested that sign-to-contract protocols should find ways to work in a witnessless environment and users could set up their own archival nodes. Eric Voskuil disagreed, stating that if nodes are not going to validate the chain, there is no reason to run a full node. Mark Friedenbach added that while SPV nodes validating these protocols will need access to witness data, if a node is performing IBD with assumevalid set to true and is also intending to prune history, then there’s no reason to fetch those witnesses. However, it would be a great disservice to the network for nodes intending to serve SPV clients to prune this portion of the block history.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T23:09:01.958090+00:00