Author: Jameson Lopp 2017-07-21 19:54:26
Published on: 2017-07-21T19:54:26+00:00
A new scaling solution has been proposed for Bitcoin by Major Kusanagi, which limits the maximum size of the UTXO set in order to address one of its primary scaling concerns. The unbounded UTXO growth issue persists despite existing solutions such as Segregated Witness, Lighting Network, and larger blocks. The proposal suggests that any UTXO not spent within a set number of blocks would be considered invalid, meaning miners and nodes in the Bitcoin network would only ever have to store that set number of blocks. However, this could cause bitcoins that have not been spent for a long time to be “lost” forever. To improve the solution, Kusanagi suggests adding a new mechanism he calls "luster" whereby UTXOs lose luster as they get older and are less valuable. Coins that are continuously used in the Bitcoin economy will never lose their luster, but those that are old and not circulating will start to lose it until all is lost and they become valueless. Coins will only start losing their luster after the average human lifespan (currently around 120 years) in order to minimise the scenarios of when coins start losing their luster. Kusanagi proposes that blockchain should store the last 150 years of history, meaning the maximum blockchain size can be calculated based on the disk space requirement for a full node. For example, if we don’t want the blockchain to be bigger than 8TB, then we should have a block size of 1 MB. If we don’t want the blockchain to be bigger than 16 TB, then we should have a block size of 2 MB and so on. The proposal would require more thought on how best wallet software could handle the changes and how it could work with sidechains.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T14:42:31.792182+00:00