Author: Alan Reiner 2012-06-17 23:17:23
Published on: 2012-06-17T23:17:23+00:00
In an email correspondence, Alan Reiner clarified the differences between his proposal and Alberto Torres's earlier proposal for a similar idea. He explained that there are two major pieces to both proposals: (1) the method for creating unspent-TxOut-tree roots/fingerprints for verification, and (2) using an alternate blockchain to maintain and distribute those fingerprints. While Torres proposed a different tree structure and putting the fingerprints in the main chain header, Reiner's proposal avoids inducing a blockchain fork by using a separate blockchain. This can be done non-disruptively and offers almost the same security as changing the protocol without hard-forking. Alberto Torres had described a similar but more simple and efficient version of the idea on the Bitcoin Wiki page in January 2012. He suggested that Armory would be the perfect client for implementing such an idea. Peter Todd raised concerns about how people could deliberately unbalance the tree with addresses with chosen hashes. One solution could be to discard any new address whose hash happens to be deeper in the tree than a certain level, indicating it was probably chosen to be unbalanced. Nonetheless, this rule would only mean that anyone playing games would find they couldn't spend their money, and the coins can always be spent with a non-pruning client to an acceptable address which can later re-spend on a pruning client.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T05:38:17.689437+00:00