Author: Luke-Jr 2013-06-06 21:48:13
Published on: 2013-06-06T21:48:13+00:00
In an email conversation on June 6, 2013, Andreas Antonopoulos discussed the use of Bitcoin's blockchain. Antonopoulos explained that the fees for storing data in the blockchain are greatly subsidized and that only miners receive these fees, not the majority of nodes. The fee system is set up as an antispam/deterrent rather than payment for storage. Antonopoulos argued that payments are the only thing agreed upon by everyone using Bitcoin and that there is no reason to store non-payments in the blockchain. He suggested that if there was such a use case, things might be arguable. However, using other people's resources for something they did not agree to use it for violates neutrality of the protocol and removes a possibility of future innovation. Moreover, Antonopoulos believed that discriminating based on transaction content risks killing a tremendous amount of innovation just as it is starting. He suggested that the size problem could be addressed without picking and choosing which uses of Bitcoin are good or bad. In response to a suggestion by another individual, Antonopoulos stated that voluntary participation should suffice, and forced storage is not the solution. Additionally, Antonopoulos explained that merged mining solves the problem. Merged mining works by tying a non-transactional merkle tree to the blockchain. The block coinbase stores the hash of the top of this merkle tree, so any data within the merkle tree can prove it is associated with the block. The merged mining merkle tree then stores hashes of multiple other datasets, enabling generic timestamping or anything else.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T18:24:41.921902+00:00