Author: Gregory Maxwell 2012-06-11 15:39:20
Published on: 2012-06-11T15:39:20+00:00
In 2012, Mike Hearn expressed his concerns about the approach of introducing unauditable single source material. He believed that it would be risky to ask users to trust developers without any means to audit the software. This would increase the attractiveness of compromising developers. If they wanted to ship pruned chains, he suggested having a deterministic process to produce archival chains and then start introducing commitments to them in the blockchain. This way, a client doing a reverse header sync would bump into a commitment for an archival chain that they have and would simply stop syncing and use the archival chain for points before that. This approach would leave it so that the distribution of the software could still be audited.Moreover, he suggested starting something with the service announcements so that full nodes that don't have enough bandwidth to support a lot of syncing from new nodes can do so without turning off listening. Greg was not a fan of the second approach because there's no indexing overhead, which speeds up startup for new users.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T01:14:57.118387+00:00