Author: Alan Reiner 2012-06-02 17:15:26
Published on: 2012-06-02T17:15:26+00:00
The discussion is about upgrading Armory's blockchain utilities, where the idea of blockchain compression is being tackled. The problem highlighted is that in a few years it may not be feasible to hold transactions file/pointers in RAM because even that would overwhelm standard RAM sizes. Blockchain compression can help solve this issue. A proposal has been made to store all transactions as 10-byte "file-references" which would be stored in a multimap indexed by the first 6 bytes of the tx-hash. However, even with this, if there are 1,000,000,000 transactions in the blockchain, each node is probably 48 bytes then you're talking about 48 GB to track all the data in RAM. Other ways to maintain a multi-terabyte blockchain are being discussed. Some vague notions have been proposed but no serious proposals have been made yet. The email also mentions blockchain pruning methods to prevent the massive amount of duplicated but no longer pertinent data. Douglas Huff suggests that most of the issues aren't really issues for other clients using established storage mechanisms (bdb, SQLite, etc) and they're using them precisely because this is a problem that people have been working on for decades and a poor candidate for reinvention.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T04:52:06.066294+00:00