Author: Peter Todd 2012-06-18 10:14:41
Published on: 2012-06-18T10:14:41+00:00
Alberto Torres wrote in 2012 about a similar idea he had described earlier and linked to his prototype. He also said that Gavin left a comment on his talk page which he hadn't seen before. Alberto thinks Armory is the perfect client to implement this idea but wants to wait until it can run on his laptop with 2GB of RAM. He disagrees with Peter Todd's suggestion that it should be implemented in Satoshi client instead of Armory. Alberto hopes to help after summer if this is still not done. He also apologizes to Peter for sending him a message privately by mistake, and doesn't understand his concern of "unbalancing" the tree. The proposal needs miner support to work, and miners generally run either the Satoshi client as a daemon, or some other custom code. Implementing the idea in Armory doesn't give those miners a nice upgrade path. Using the hash tree, however, is something that can be implemented in any client, but a lot of the code will be shared between calculating it and using it anyway, so again implementing in the Satoshi client makes sense. Suppose we're trying to make a tree consisting of real numbers. If the numbers are evenly distributed, as will happen with hashes of arbitrary data, any number will be at most log(n) steps away from the head of the tree. However, if some malicious actor adds some numbers to that tree, the balance of the tree will be upset.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T05:37:54.240042+00:00