Author: Mark Friedenbach 2014-01-08 01:04:58
Published on: 2014-01-08T01:04:58+00:00
On January 6th, 2014, in an email conversation between Thomas Voegtlin and Gregory Maxwell on the Bitcoin development mailing list, Maxwell proposed a method for restructuring the current unspent transaction output (UTXO) index as a Merkle tree. He suggested that this could be done iteratively and would involve splitting coins into individual outputs and adding interior nodes to the leveldb database. The new structure would use hash commitments added to the coinbase and would have nothing to do with the script keyed "wallet index." The benefits of this change would be that nodes which do not have access to the UTXO set could still receive transactions or entire blocks with prefixed proofs and check the validity of the transaction with just the information available (proof + transaction contents). This means the node wouldn't need to store the entire UTXO set in duplicated form, indexed by scriptPubKey or H(scriptPubKey), and including proofs of this structure as well. Maxwell also noted that after the proposed soft-fork, all that would be required is a protocol version update and/or a service bit to indicate the ability to send or receive proof-prefixed messages. He called this an incremental update.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T22:43:22.556978+00:00