Author: Gregory Maxwell 2012-06-21 22:02:27
Published on: 2012-06-21T22:02:27+00:00
In a conversation between Mike Koss and an unknown individual, it was discussed that pruning spent transactions from an old block wasn't the only topic of discussion. Instead, they were talking about commitments to the state of unspent transactions that would enable memoryless nodes to fully validate without trust. The idea is also aimed at securely initializing new pruned nodes without exposing them to the old history of the chain. Both of these ideas are possible without degrading the full node security model significantly. However, it requires adopting a new data structure for managing trees of unspent transactions in a secure, scalable, and DOS resistant manner. There are lots of possibilities here. When asked if it made sense to adopt a more complex data-structure than the merkle tree for inclusion in the bitcoin protocol, the answer was yes, but this would take some time.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T03:51:24.205683+00:00